Choosing to Care And Comfort in Katrina's Wake

The federal government's clueless, agonizingly slow response. New Orleans officials' failure to evacuate the endangered. Funds that would have fortified the city's neglected levees diverted to homeland security and the war in Iraq. The thousands who ignored or didn't understand the warnings, or who lacked the resources to escape the danger.

Many U.S. citizens proceeded to the stadium where they'd been told to gather for evacuation -- and found that they'd been directed into hell. We saw what happened there.

Nobody sees the choices each of us makes to assemble -- invisibly, inch by mental inch -- our response to a tragedy. Photo by photo, word by word, judgment by judgment, we construct an opinion.

Everyone, we remind ourselves, has choices. Many were disgusted by those who chose to remain in the path of a Category 5 storm despite having the cars, cash and connections to flee. They had a point. But those "victims" were indistinguishable from thousands who had no means of evacuating. Others focused more on the comparatively few who chose to loot than on the thousands of law-abiding citizens whose patience was rewarded with hunger, filth, endangerment and death.

Choice is complicated. Like many Americans, I never "chose" to be born into a family with the schooling, discipline and income to support and educate me. I can't know what I would have become without them.

And yet I've still made knuckleheaded choices. Often, I've been saved from them by the systems and connections upon which the middle class -- like the flood-trapped college students whose resourceful parents got Jesse Jackson himself to rescue them -- rely.

When the levees broke, what systems helped New Orleans's poor?

We got to this place in America because long ago, people decided that some of their fellow citizens deserved less, and others got comfortable with them having it: less opportunity, less safe housing, less quality education, less protection by their government. The consequences of those decisions multiplied, fed on themselves.

They keep feeding.

Some events, no one would choose. What we can choose is our response to them, and to those forced to face these circumstances with less.

We can judge. We can blame. We can leave folks to their own devices. Or we can help.

Many black Americans -- think Kanye West -- couldn't help wondering whether the disproportionate blackness of Katrina's victims contributed to the federal government's sluggishness. I can't blame them.

Yet I can choose to recognize the streams of caring people, vast numbers of them white, who transported their boats, trucks, supplies and willing bodies into dangerous waters to be of assistance. We can all be grateful to millions more who are opening their checkbooks and homes to those in need.

Moment by moment, we choose: to open our hearts or slam them shut. To build systems that prevent future tragedies, or walls between neighbors that ensure their repetition. To love our fellow citizens or to fear them.

At this moment, Americans overwhelmingly are choosing love.

That's what I hope to remember.