Power of the elements puts Americans at mercy of God
- From: "Jules" <joolio11@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 10:26:49 -0400
September 24, 2005
The Times
Power of the elements puts Americans at mercy of God
By Gerard Baker, US Editor
Extreme weather is measured in the thousands of people it kills
ALONG the Gulf Coast this week, with Hurricane Rita hurtling
their way, millions of residents were observing what has now become a
seasonal ritual - boarding up homes, packing effects into car boots, joining
long traffic jams and, above all, praying.
Mindful of the criticism that followed Hurricane Katrina,
President Bush has been a blur of activity - mobilising armed forces,
readying supplies. But he was also calling for higher assistance. "We hope
and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm," he said on
Thursday.
America is a famously religious country. It is also a country
that is famously prone to all manner of natural disasters. It is hard to
resist the conclusion that the two facts are somehow related.
It may have been its spacious skies and waves of grain that made
so many Americans see the work of the Maker in their vast country. But it is
just as surely its exposure to wrathful clouds and floods that turns them to
contemplation of the contingency of Man's existence on some great external
force.
In secular Britain, extreme weather means the occasional nip of
frost on the rosebush in early June; a bit too much rain, even for
Manchester, in August. In America, extreme weather is measured in the
thousands of people it kills, in the days or weeks that millions of people
go without power and in the hundreds of billions of dollars it costs to
repair the ravaged infrastructure. The tableau of the nation 's weather
features street signs peeping out from 8 ft of water, pleasure boats perched
on houses, cars sliced in half by fallen trees, entire towns buried under
30ft snow drifts.
These, rather than leaden skies and a persistent drizzle, are
quite likely to induce a sense of awe at the power of the creation. The
pilgrims from The Mayflower praised God for the russet delights of that
first New England autumn. Half of them then dropped dead from the winter
cold. Mark Twain once said he had counted 136 different kinds of weather in
24 hours - in the spring.
I have travelled far in my life but I still can't recall
anything that beat the skin-searing heat of the California desert or the
lung-piercing cold of the Minnesota lakes. The Katrinas and the Ritas get
all the attention but every day something is going on somewhere in the
atmosphere that kills people and upends lives - tornadoes whipping up houses
or mudslides carrying cars away.
And it is not just the climate, not just hurricanes and floods,
but earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, vast forest fires that wipe out
millions of acres in days.
It is scarcely any wonder, in the face of such natural ferment,
that fundamentalism has such strong support here in America. It is not just
the sense that you really are at the mercy of something out there, but the
very landscape feels biblical.
For most British a reading of Exodus, with its plagues of
locusts and pillars of cloud, requires some imagination. For Americans, it
reads like a weather report. I haven't yet seen the waters of Lake Superior
part or a bush suddenly catch fire on a mountain top but I should not be at
all surprised if I did.
When natural disasters strike elsewhere there is an instant
deluge - especially in Britain - of what academics call theodicy, the
philosophical problem that the existence of evil in a world created by a
good God poses for believers. After the South Asian tsunami last year,
atheists insisted that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents
showed there could be no God. Even believers were forced to acknowledge the
challenge for faith of such loss of life. But in America, after the
devastation of Katrina, I can't recall one single media discussion on the
subject.
God has been very much on people's minds, of course, after the
disaster. But the events have, it seems, been taken as affirmation of his
existence rather than refutation. There have been prayers of thanks for
those who survived, prayers for the souls of those who died, prayers for the
safe recovery of those still missing. Some - few, I emphasise, but some -
have wondered whether the wrath wrought on New Or leans was some sort of
divine punishment for the famously libertine soul of that city.
And yet, as if in tribute to Man's own capacity to defy nature,
even as the levees were being breached again, New Orleans is being rebuilt,
the bars in the French Quarter are already reopening, solid proof that in
this vast, God-fearing country, there is still plenty of room for sinners.
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