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COLUMNS
Crying over spilled oil won’t fix problems, heal country
July 15, 2010 | The Catholic Sun
It seems as if God really wants to teach us how to work together in America to solve problems. After several decades of prosperity and comfort ironically isolated us from each other, we find ourselves suddenly scrambling to find a way to solve huge problems, and working together is the only way we are going to do it.
The gigantic oil spill in the Gulf is the latest challenge. I believe we will all get the hint very quickly that we need to work together in a supportive fashion to solve this crisis, rather than against each other, complaining about the causes and finding someone to blame.
But how can we stop the crying — and the blaming — long enough to get anything done? A little history lesson might help.
More than 600 years ago the Black Death killed almost 100 million people — about a quarter of the world’s population in 1400. The cause for the disease unknown (now known to be a bacterium transmitted by rats to humans aboard ships on long journeys), many people were led to believe it was caused by Jews poisoning wells. Jewish communities were exterminated and thousands were killed.
People afraid of contracting the disease abandoned their loved ones and left them to die at the first sign of illness and neighbors turned against neighbor because of fear of contracting the disease.
Thankfully we have never had to deal with such a challenging tragedy in our generation in America and thankfully, too, we have never reacted in such a deplorable manner to any of the tragedies that have befallen us.
We should be delighted at both realizations, but also be forewarned.
There is an important distinction to be made between searching for the cause of a problem in hopes of alleviating its damage and scapegoating — simply looking for someone to blame in hopes of taking revenge or acting out our rage. That’s tantamount to crying over spilled milk but in a pretty damaging way.
We must, and I believe we will, band together to fix these human tragedies, to relieve the pain and suffering, to bring people together to access the ingenuity and compassion of the human spirit, rather than segregating, judging and condemning which only isolates us and reduces our potential to fix the problems at hand.
Relieving pain
For the last century, the Catholic Church has been a great example of the former. Through a vast network of missionaries and aid workers, the pain and suffering of millions suffering from hunger, homelessness, poverty, disease and social deprivation have been relieved. Through all those efforts, the Church has not chosen to blame, criticize or judge, but rather to relieve the pain and suffering.
Whether it’s blaming British Petroleum, that may turn out to be legitimately at fault for this tragedy, or blaming our dependence on oil, or blaming the president for his lack of oversight, or even the over-regulation that might have forced the oil industry to pursue extraordinary and ill-advised drilling methods and depths, none of that will stop the problem at hand. And those issues do not help to relieve the suffering now.
But we do have a tremendous opportunity in America to follow the Catholic Church’s lead. Let’s do our best to stop the leak of all the human sufferings in our society before we look for someone to blame for them.
Maybe if we come together in love to do that, we might just get to the root of all the problems as well. God works in mysterious ways. |
