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After the Asian tsunami last December, the outpouring of help, rescue, and relief efforts assured many that God was good despite the disaster. But the chaos into which New Orleans has fallen is so disturbing that it makes a convincing argument for either God's absence or man's depravity.

News reports abound with stories of death, rape, murder, and theft. "Thursday saw tens of thousands being evacuated by bus to Houston from the hot and stinking Superdome. Fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses. The looting continued."

The Associated Press reports, "By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town."

"Hoodlums" have shot at rescue helicopters sent to evacuate people stranded on rooftops and in hospitals that can no longer take care of patients. At the New Orleans Convention Center, 15,000 to 20,000 people took a shelter only to find lawlessness. When a helicopter arrived to drop off food and water the thronging crowd was so thick it couldn't land. Instead the helicopter dropped supplies from the air.

Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal writes:

Physical strength has suddenly become more important than knowledge, or education. Everything smells.

For Americans, this is humbling, and aggravating. … There has been a descent so clear into indecency that one must address it as pressingly as the breakdown of the city's levees. It is as if the moral and civic "levees," too, were overwhelmed by the torrent. Once the waters have receded, New Orleans will face a task that will test our national mettle. A part of that task will be to ask why so many stooped so low as the waters rose so high.

Yet the chaos in New Orleans is not the only story. Donations by individuals and corporations in support of the rescue cleanup efforts are expected to top $1 billion. Churches and individuals are opening their facilities and homes to shelter and feed refugees, even against the government's advice. "Some of those offering shelter say they've been discouraged from doing so by government officials who fear the consequences of putting strangers in private homes. But that hasn't tempered grass-roots enthusiasm."

"I just don't believe that some guy with a couple kids who just lost his casino job is going to rob me," Tim Green of Joplin, Mo. told The Boston Globe. Green hopes to make a bedroom out of his basement recreation room. "These people are going to need more than just money. They're being herded around the Astrodome like cattle, with no communication to the outside world. They need to know that people want to help."

Perhaps the lawlessness in parts of New Orleans and the compassion of strangers around America shows that it's easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor. But it might also be an accurate picture of each one of us. Total depravity mixed with God's grace, saving us from ourselves.

More hurricane news:

• Explosions Fill New Orleans Sky With Smoke | It was the opening strike in yet another day of sadly deteriorating conditions. (Associated Press)
• New Orleans in Anarchy With Fights, Rapes | New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear. (Associated Press)

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49