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Coping with Disaster As I watched the television news coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with my 12-year-old son, Kevin, I felt deep sadness, horror, and soul-clenching fear. The stranding of so many citizens in the New Orleans Superdome, trapping them in rain, flood, and lawlessness, was one image. Another was the people who had walked several miles from the city center to a bridge where a police commander had said buses would pick them up. There were no buses. When they tried to cross on foot into the safety of the suburbs, they were beaten back by police. My son and I watched. We wondered where the helicopters were—the helicopters that could bring in food and water and take out the sick, the elderly, the very young. The horror and fear I felt was fueled not merely by the images with their evidence of incompetence and bureaucracy. No. The deep, gut-wrenching fear I felt was when looked at my son, sitting there beside me, his skin glowing copper-bronze, his black hair a mass of tangled curls, and I thought: if he were there, would anyone help him? But the worst part was what I saw with his eyes. “Those are all black people in there,” he said of the Superdome. “Why are they the ones who stayed behind? Why didn’t they have buses take them out before the storm came? Where are the helicopters to help them? These are questions many of us have asked over the last two weeks. But as they came to my ears from my child, I witnessed the death of innocence. The President of our Unitarian Universalist Association, Bill Sinkford, is a black man. He is the first black President that our association of congregations has ever had. In the 400-year history of Unitarianism and Universalism, he is the first person of color to rise to prominence in our national associations. Tears were in his eyes as he watched the devastation caused by human inaction and human failure in New Orleans . “I am so angry,” he said. “I’ve had to stop watching.” He has experience as a black person in America. My son is bewildered, but Sinkford is angry. “Tens of thousands of American citizens, almost all of them poor and Black, living in unimaginable conditions with no food and water, waited for days while evacuation buses passed them by to pick up tourists from luxury hotels,” Sinkford said. “These last days have provided a picture of what racism and classism and privilege look like,” he said. “Racism is not about individual prejudice. Classism is not about individual poverty. And privilege is so often allowed to be invisible.” Before I became the parent of two children of color, I may not have understood what Sinkford meant. But try explaining to a twelve-year-old why the people who look like him were left behind. They didn’t have cars. They didn’t have money. They didn’t have a way to leave. No one in charge of planning for the hurricane decided to get them out, until it was too late. The kinds of questions kids ask are not easy to answer. Why are all the poor people black? Why did the white people in charge think it was OK to let them stay in the city? He did notice that white people were in charge. As I have talked with members of our congregation and our community about the thoughts and feelings they’ve had in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many have expressed despair and frustration. We live in a country that has so many resources, and yet we were unable or unwilling to bring them to bear sooner to help the people stranded in New Orleans . And many have noticed the structural injustice—the way that structural racism and structural classism meant that the city center was filled with people of color who could not simply get in a car and get out of the city before the storm. So many of the people I’ve talked with have said that they feel almost unable to cope with the string of disasters and tragic loss of life we have experienced in this “new millennium.” We gather here today, on the anniversary of the September 11th attack on the world trade center, and in our minds is that day just four year ago and the people who died there; the many young, dead soldiers and civilians in Iraq; the tsunami that took so many lives in south Asia. Death and destruction by natural forces is difficult enough to accept. But when we see human action and inaction multiply the harm, we become angry, we feel helpless, we struggle to cope. It is easy to be overcome by despair as we contemplate the many tragedies and failings of humanity. To cope with grief and despair, we must acknowledge the pain we feel and seek ways to heal. We must respect the sadness we feel and seek consolation. We must honor the anger we feel and seek to make a difference. The poet Wendell Berry said, “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” Like Wendell Berry, I have found solace for my wounded spirit in the beauty of wild places: the crash of the surf, the outstretched arms of the sky, the sun glimmering on the heaving water. I have taken long walks. The sky has been blue and clear. Nantucket has embraced me with its beauty. There is also solace in communion with others. In small groups, or one-on-one, I have talked quietly with others. Deep sadness, compassion, anger, and desolation of the spirit moved gently among us. In our pain, we turn to each other. We gather here, in community. The presence of other human beings, the touch of hand on shoulder, the embracing—these all are what the simple wounded parts of our being need. Reaching out to each other, we find consolation too in our mutual longing to be of help to those who are the victims of this tragedy: the refugees who are left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. We talk, we plan, we take action. Here on Nantucket we know how to kick-start the fundraising engine. And, as individuals, we are generous and willing to give. These responses not only provide real help where it is needed; they also help us heal. And then there is the anger. Bill Sinkford says, “We are a gentle and generous people. But let us not forget our anger. May it fuel not only our commitment to compassion but also our commitment to make fundamental changes.” The inequities of slavery and the defeat of the South in the Civil War contributed to years of systematic inequality in education, jobs, and housing. Although our laws have changed in the great civil rights struggle of the 1960s, those systematic injustices were never fully addressed. Like toxic floodwaters that remain after the storm to contaminate everything they touch, racist laws and attitudes polluted the earth and the very air that black people breathed. The effects linger still. We saw the consequences in New Orleans . Those were not our racist laws. Many here are of a generation that helped to change those laws. Yet there is still work to do. We as a nation, as a community of conscience, are now called to rebuild. Some of us will join with others to clean up the rubble and repair the broken windows. But that is not the sort of rebuilding I mean. We are called to rebuild our society on new ground: on a whole new set of assumptions about how people live and what they need to flourish. We are called to share in a new and more honest assessment our nation’s responsibility to all its citizens. We are called to do justice. Those who have died, those who have suffered, and the many who continue to suffer deserve our compassion, but they deserve more than that. They deserve meaning. It is we the living who give meaning to their deaths. I saw the despair of New Orleans through my son’s eyes. I witnessed his loss of innocence, his wonderment that people who look like me could be so uncaring toward people who look like him. I love him. The only response I can find is to create new meaning. To acknowledge the disaster but refuse to accept it as a description of the future. There is a better way. There is an America where my son can stand tall, where he need not look with wounded eyes at the images on television. Coping with disaster means changing the future, so that people look back on the horrible events that began this millennium and say, “That was the turning point. After New Orleans, everything changed.” It is up to us to make that change a change for the better. Let us “hew from the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”(2) Footnotes: 1.) Archibald MacLeish, “The Young Dead Soldiers,” reprinted in the UU hymnal as No. 583. 2.) Martin Luther King, Jr., excerpt reprinted in the UU hymnal as “An Inescapable Network of Mutuality,” No. 584.
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