Torch Column: Reverendly Yours

19 September 2017

 Reverendly Yours - Rev. Tom Goldsmith

“Our whole city is underwater right now,” said Mayor Derrick Freeman of Port Arthur, Texas. It seemed that Hurricane Harvey hit the town with more fury than anywhere else. Even the shelters were flooded.

I single out Port Arthur in the whole Houston area devastation because Port Arthur has been drowning for a long time in other ways, too, like poverty The media tries hard to make distinctions between Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Katrina twelve years ago in New Orleans. Katrina demolished the low-lying areas of New Orleans populated mostly by African Americans. Real Estate runs pretty cheap in the 9th Ward, where if the levees were ever breached, that district would be the most vulnerable.

And what we hear mostly these days is that unlike New Orleans, Houston’s Hurricane Harvey ostensibly affected rich and poor alike. Just like it says in the Bible: It rains on the just and unjust.

Bill McKibben thought it mighty interesting that places like Port Arthur were absolutely trashed by Harvey, where once again, contrary to news reports, the poorest people get hit the hardest. Port Arthur is a difficult place to live, even in the “best” of times. The town is affordable for the poor because of the daily pollution that comes from the fossil fuel industry.

Port Arthur can boast (if it wishes) having the largest oil refinery in the country, home to Motiva oil. The chemical plants that saturate the town, have now exploded and caught fire. Urban blight is featured in African American neighborhoods, and it becomes transparently obvious that human justice and earth justice are of a single thread. What is perilous for the earth is also perilous for vulnerable people.

At this point we still don’t know how relief aid will be distributed. Will the wealthier homes in Houston have an advantage? Will the fossil fuel industries receive a share of relief monies despite playing a guilty hand for decades in creating hurricanes that were once simply unimaginable? Will justice be equitably distributed in Houston’s efforts to rebuild? And we must ask the same for Southern Florida. And there are more hurricanes to come in this season alone.

And yet, at the same time when the ferocity of Hurricane Harvey hit land, Denmark announced that it sold off its last remaining oil company, and was going to use the cash to build more wind turbines. I don’t think hurricanes ever stray too closely to Denmark, yet the country (run by a conservative government), still has a sense of what the future means. We need to prepare for a new mode of existence, a new mode of powering our homes and industries, a new way of ensuring life on a fragile planet. It’s a certain mindset that we in our nation can’t seem to muster.

Bob Dylan may pose the question: How many hurricanes will it take till we change? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. TRG