Through A Glass Darkly

In the immeadiate response to the Katrina disaster, the perhaps most revealing commentary came from those least effected. The rush to spin by those hundreds of miles from the Gulf Coast, and thousands of lightyears from the way people live there was upsetting, self-agrandizing, and intemperate.

On the one hand we have the liberal voices announcing (cf. Molly Ivans) without a shred of either logic or evidence, what caused the damage. Or a rapper completely willing to ignore the facts to proclaim the relief efforts to which he did not contribute, are racist.

On the other hand, we find conservatives proclaiming the flooding of New Orleans and the destruction of Biloxi were God acting to punish evil doers. Little details like the majority of innocents harmed apparently escape God's vision.

What the lunatics, left and right share is defective vision. The use the lense of their ideology to see everything. By doing so the see nothing clearly. Coloring the world with ideology leads to amazingly stupid ideas. Pat Robertson forgets that the America he claims to love is governed by law and calls on its officials to commit murder. Molly Ivans assumes that someone must be guilty and that someone must be a Republican.

Ideology blinds.

What do I think we should use instead? A subject for another post.