How Many Victims Does It Take?

As we all have been told by every conceivable media outlet, Hurricane Katrina was a huge disaster in more ways than just “natural.” It was a response disaster, a political disaster, an infrastructure disaster, a communications disaster and a public relations disaster.

I think it was a news coverage disaster as well. Like the record low pressure that fueled the intensity of Katrina’s devastating winds, it seems to me that network news sank to an all-time low in journalistic integrity, which fueled the intensity and violence of the human reaction. This in turn exacerbated the hurricane’s toll in ways the media is unwilling to measure or admit.

While it may have been impossible to overstate the horror of the natural devastation, the media overstepped its role as a public servant and coerced public opinion by manipulating the flow of information at this intersection of natural disaster, human loss and mishandled relief efforts.

That being said, the Katrina disaster was vast and unspeakably ruthless. It left thousands homeless, jobless, financially ruined and emotionally broken.

However, there is a strange irony at work in the sheer magnitude of the hurricane. It was the magnitude that captured the media’s attention. They in turn amplified the cries for rescue and magnified the images of desperation, which likely awakened the American public from its normal self-indulgent stupor in front of the TV long enough to send millions and millions of private sector dollars streaming toward the massive relief efforts. In short, the storm made good television. This turned out to be good news for Katrina’s victims, who stand to receive significant help and hope for tomorrow.

This interesting irony raises a question: How many victims does it take?

In each of our towns and cities, today and tomorrow, there will be people hit by mini-hurricanes of personal devastation. But when destruction happens one family at a time, it’s likely that the media won’t notice. They will not send a reporter to jam a microphone in some government official’s face, demanding that he or she answer why this isolated victim of quiet personal disaster was treated with contempt and disrespect and refused help.

And the platinum-record rock stars will not even notice, nor will they sing a fundraising song for a maid cleaning their $1,000-a-night hotel room who will lose her job because her husband came home drunk and she showed up for work late after trying to recover from the storm he unleashed in the kitchen last night.

The fact is that Katrina was a cover-girl catastrophe. America notices cover girls. But there are people similarly devastated by personal tragedy every day in every town in America who won’t have anyone getting angry about the relief not coming to them. These people are just plain lost. They cannot gather in the Superdome. They have nowhere to go for help, even help that is woefully late in coming.

These are the victims our denomination was raised up to notice — the lonely victims of these mini-disasters that will never make a blip on the media’s radar.

It doesn’t take much divine help to see Katrina’s victims. Even people of scandalous immorality can be startled out of their self-serving sin to sing a song that generates a million dollars of aid per minute.

But it takes godly vision to see those individuals who were not “fortunate” enough to have disaster flood their lives simultaneously with a million others. Who now face the world with no buses coming, and no relief helicopters hovering overhead, no 800 number to call, and no local churches and television stations filling relief trucks with “much-needed supplies.”

These are the unseen and the unsought. These are people who will drown in the attic of their idiosyncratic need — unless there’s some valiant group of rescuers willing to search for them in their own neighborhood. Can we Free Methodists be that group of people?

If we are true to our historic roots, the vision of even one desperate soul just around the corner from the church will blow us off our foundations and flood our hearts with a passion to help.