A couple of weeks ago hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans, the laid back adult entertainment capital of America, into the Big Uneasy. Katrina unmasked the city's over-reliance on ineffective city, state, and federal governance. When levees surrounding New Orleans broke, a flood of water, looting, rape, and violence horrified the world. How can this be happening in America? Can the streets of New Orleans overnight become as dangerous as the streets of Baghdad?

They not only can. They did.

Headlines quickly morphed from Mother Nature's anything but maternal behavior into the failure of governance. Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco and FEMA Director Michael Brown and President Bush all scrambled to avoid blame.

But these are not the most significant stories following Katrina. We all know that hurricanes cause disaster and that government is largely ineffective.

The most significant story following Katrina is that America's most robust first responders remain its families and its churches. In the first hours of Katrina's fury, families and local churches snapped to action. Thousands of local parishes donated hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours of volunteer time as they reached out to others in need. This response of strength and love masked the flatfooted bickering of politicians and exposed the vulnerability of our over-secularized culture.

We expect families to care for each other. This is a key reason to promote their stability and unique contribution. But given how archaic and irrelevant churches continue to be portrayed in the press and in politics, many were amazed by their essential contribution in this time of need.

tothesource has been saying this for three years. The hard cultural assets of faith and family are not the fluff of our nation, they are its bedrock. tothesource will continue to expose the arrogance of the modern state when it attempts to dismantle these institutions. It is our position that our government's very existence is based on the strength and dignity of these communities of family and faith.

Faith and family sustain us. Government regulates us. Government in a limited way can enable us, but faith and family empower us. Therefore, government must not aid in their deconstruction. Instead, paradoxically, for government to be effective faith and family must flourish.

What we are witnessing again in the aftermath of Katrina is that the strength of America remains in our communities of faith and family.

We hope that story gets reported.

The Church rises to the challenge

Churches around the country are mobilizing immense resources to aid the evacuees fleeing the damage of Hurricane Katrina. An estimated 250,000 people have come to Texas alone seeking assistance. Religious leaders from across Houston, where over 18,000 evacuees are now living in the city's Astrodome, gathered this week to organize a coordinated relief effort that has been dubbed project Operation Compassion.

Meeting in the sanctuary of Second Baptist Church, religious leaders learned that feeding those housed at the Astrodome would require 240 volunteers for each of the three daily meal-line shifts and $125,000 a day for food totaling $4 million a month. Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church of Houston, just one of dozens of churches in the area responding generously to the need, is mobilizing church members to shoulder the responsibility of feeding the entire Astrodome for 2 days in September.

"Many churches have found a niche, becoming mini-relief agencies, filling in gaps where the government has failed.
Pastors at two large Baptist churches stood before their swollen congregations and spoke about practical problems -- talking about building showers at a shelter, telling people how to volunteer or donate clothing and asking whether anyone in their congregation had access to a warehouse. One pastor stood in front of handwritten signs that gave instructions on where to put piles of clothing.

"To be honest with you, we can't wait for the agencies," said Stuart Rothberg, the pastor at Exciting Istrouma Baptist Church, the home of a Red Cross shelter with about 700 evacuees. "There is too much bureaucracy. We can't get through to them. Our communication system doesn't work."

So they are doing it on their own."

The Wisdom of C. S. Lewis

"...for He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve every moment almost a sort of divine abdication."

FEMA Director sent back to Washington

Chief Michael Brown (L) and U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen look on as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (C) speaks during a press conference September 9, 2005 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. FEMA Chief Michael Brown was removed from his role managing Hurricane Katrina and is being sent back to Washington D.C. and U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen will resume management of Katrina.

Looting hampers New Orleans rescue effort

"In New Orleans, shell-shocked officials tried to regain control of the historic jazz city reduced to ruin by Monday's storm.

A National Guard soldier was shot and wounded on Wednesday in the Superdome arena housing thousands of refugees in increasingly squalid conditions.

An angry Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco told reporters: 'We will do what it takes to bring law and order to our area.'

'I'm just furious. It's intolerable,' she said."

A tothesource reader sent us her first hand experience of volunteering at the Astrodome last week. We thought all of you would be interested in what she had to say.

I went to help at the Astrodome. It seemed very orderly to me. There were too many food service volunteers as I was assigned to do so I just went around talking to people. A lot of people just needed to talk. One lady said the army gave them food supplies at the Superdome. Others were rescued by boat and taken to the I 10 Bridge where they slept for 2 days before a bus picked them up. There were 30,000 evacuees there. Food was over abundantly supplied. Buses were taking people to relocate them in other cities and states. Free housing is being given for 6 months in Houston to all over 55. One man got mad because the breakfast we were serving was cold (cereal and muffins and fruit) and kept talking about how bad everything is. That made me angry. Another lady told me she was ashamed how unappreciative some were. The Astrodome used to be completely packed but now most are gone. So many I guess are resettling. My kid’s school is taking in 65 students from New Orleans for the fall semester. Many of them will live with local families. I get 10 e-mails a day from organizations my family is involved with. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and our church. People are talking with each other about ways to help. Others who have gone to the shelters have told me that when they went to volunteer there were more volunteers than needed. I got an e-mail today that a faith organization will be setting up pastoral and lay care soon at the shelters. These people have been through a lot. They need to vent their anger. They need to be heard.

Sandy from Houston

Arnold will veto gay marriage bill

A day after California's Legislature became the first in the nation to pass a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced through an aide Wednesday that he would veto the measure "out of respect for the will of the people."

In a careful statement, Schwarzenegger press secretary Margita Thompson invoked the voter approval in March 2000 of Proposition 22, which said: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

LA Times

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