Katrina, courage, faith, and tribes

Katrina, courage, faith, and tribes

Bill Whittle at “Eject! Eject! Eject!” has posted a brilliant, if sometimes crudely worded (R-Rated), post about the nature of white hats and black hats, pink and grey, or sheep, wolves, and sheep-dogs: TRIBES. It is a passionate, reasoned response to the aftermath of Katrina, the erosion of moral levees, and the shocking polar opposite of 9/11 heroism. Watching this, many of us struggle for answers: “Why?”

Bill’s post doesn’t offer a solution, but he does offer a perspective and a cultural critique that is thought-provoking. There’s no way I could do it justice by summarizing it. If you are not easily offended by coarse language, you should read it yourself. Bill is not a man of faith, his language is blue, but his passion is righteous.

Here’re the final grafs to tempt you:

It takes courage to fight oncoming storms. Courage.

Courage isn’t free. It is taught, taught by certain tribes who have been around enough and seen enough incoming storms to know what one looks like. And I think the people of this nation, and those of New Orleans, specifically, desire and deserve some fundamental lessons in courage.

Because we are going to need it.

I love Bill’s post, and I largely agree with it. The biggest problem I see with it, though, is his failure to provide a clear basis for change, or a clear rationale for the basis for his call to courage. He admits in his post he does not believe in a God. Yet, without a moral law give upon which our own moral laws depend, what basis is there for morality, courage, ethics, sacrifice?

Bill is a beneficiary of a worldview informed by and founded on moral absolutes. He can reject the lawgiver while embracing the law (and I speak of moral law, not the Constitution, etc.), but it would seem to me that converts to such a cause would have a hard time sustaining its passion because there is no immovable center.

And that is the primary reason why we’re seeing the outrageous things we’re seeing post-Katrina. Spineless leadership, whining, self-serving celebrities, and finger-pointing liberals all stem from one root cause: not merely the failure of courage but the failure of faith. Not faith as in the hope-for/believe-for/pray-for kind of faith, but faith that man is a fallen creature, that evil lurks in our hearts, that the works of our hands will ultimately fail, the the fallen world we live in strives against us, that political corruption undermines political good-will, that there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, and faith that if we are not born anew with the vigor and passion of transformed hearts, minds, souls, and bodies, we, too, will be whimpering, whining, finger-pointing blow-hards.

Thanks to Amy Maxell’s blog post for the link.

[tags]BlogRodent, katrina, hurricane-katrina, blame-game, bill-whittle, amy-maxwell[/tags]

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