Agency

I heard the following quotes on a special NPR program this afternoon. It brought to mind conversations we have been having recently in our "History of Christianity in the Non-Western World" class about "agency." Meaning, "who are the principal actors in a given event?" For example, if we only speak about the Opium Wars in China as an act of British aggression to force trade upon China, then we are only considering one side to the story. The only actor is England. China is portrayed as a passive recipient of their aggression. To some extent this strips the Chinese of any active role. In this particular case there was a whole history of events going on behind the scenes that led up to the Opium Wars.

Anyways, that's all beside the point. But we have been talking a lot about considering free-will and autonomy and responsibility for actions. So, all that was running through my head when I heard the story about New Orleans today.

On returning to New Orleans after Katrina:

“When we were in San Antonio, people said to us, ‘Why don’t you just stay here in Texas?’ But they didn’t understand. I wanted to go home. New Orleans is my home.”

“And besides, everywhere you go there are natural disasters, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes… You can’t escape natural disasters. You just learn to live with them.”

“Yeah, and if you think about it, it wasn’t actually the hurricane that did us in. It wasn’t the hurricane that was the problem, it was the breaching of the levees.”

Note, I am not meaning to criticize anyone in New Orleans. They have gone through more suffering and heartache than I can imagine, and it is totally understandable for them to be angry and frustrated right now. I would be devastated if my house was washed away by a flood, my neighborhood was destroyed, and my city trashed.

That said, I think it is an interesting perspective; that the hurricane wasn't the problem, it was the army corps of engineers who didn't build the levees correctly. On the one hand, yes, that was part of the problem. But...

I guess it's a coping mechanism of some sort, right? Trying to comprehend a catastrophic event of this scale is impossible, so you have to zero in on something smaller, something more manageable? Or maybe there are other things going on?

My gut response is that it sounded like an emotional reaction, some sort of denial. So, how does a pastor respond to (potentially) misplaced anger and denial in the cycle of grief and mourning? Obviously with care and kindness and compassion of course. I mean, these folks lost everything. But, compassion etc. are just emotions. What do you actually say?

UPDATE: In today's Tribune there is an interesting article about the factor race plays in the discussion of Katrina:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0602270206feb27,1,789677.column?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed.

Note, you'll need to register to read the article, so I would usggest going here first: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.chicagotribune.com.

One key quote:

We can talk about the White House's inability to cut through bureaucratic red tape and quickly settle disputes among response agencies.

We can talk about the failures of a half-dozen federal agencies, particularly the Department of Homeland Security.

But can we talk about the governmental failures of Katrina and policy changes without at least considering the race question? Can we mount a sincere effort about what went wrong without discussing the poverty, the lack of opportunity, the invisibility of the residents?

A lot of people will look at the failures and see them as being unrelated to questions of race. Others will see them as being fundamentally rooted in race.

"We as a nation have to make a decision about what we do next," Lacewell said. "And something still quite apparent is that blacks and whites often have vastly different views about what happened and how to fix it."