J
A N U A R Y 1 0 , 2 0 0 5
The
weather could be worse
Chris
and Stephanie have arrived in Reno. They were greeted by 4'
of snow and another storm on its way.
The
moving van has also now made it to Reno. A neighbor has been
attempting for hours to pull it up the hill to their house with
his monster truck. Thus far unsuccessfully, though it has budged
a few feet, Stephanie reports.
The
next snowstorm has already started.
Couldn't
handle the dentist today
Cancelled
out.
‘Desperate’ conditions at
complex require action
Barbara
Carmen | Dispatch
After
10 years and more than $70 million in public and private investment,
the Woodland Meadows apartment complex is a massive slum.
Yes,
the pre-Christmas ice storm that bombed the city is to blame
for the most recent horrendous mess at the East Side complex.
Trees were uprooted or splintered. The electrical blackout
shut down the complex’s boilers, which in turn froze
the water pipes and exploded large segments of the heating
system.
...
When
the complex’s management handed out space heaters around
Christmas — let it be noted, a nice thing to do —
Columbus Fire Division officials didn’t envision cozy
families huddled together nibbling sugar plums, but rather,
mass death.
A
team of nine firefighters went knocking on doors to offer
safety tips and warn residents to stop using ovens for heat.
They feared fires and serious burns.
Firefighters
got cooperation, and an eyeful.
"The
living conditions of many of the residents can only be described
as desperate," Battalion Chief Yolanda Arnold wrote in
a Jan. 6 memo to her boss, Fire Chief Ned Pettus.
She
documented problems that have festered for years:
"There
are vacant apartments without doors. Trash and garbage litter
the floors, windows and exterior doors have no glass in them.
There are animals in the vacant apartments. Human and animal
waste are on the floors."
She
found squatters and signs of recent fires in empty units.
For
years, management has promised that it’s working on
all this. Just how long do we give landlords to drain sewage,
remove mold and provide heat where children and the elderly
live?
A
week? A month? Years?
Unlike
city code officers, who were either jaded, lazy or incredibly
accommodating to management, firefighters were shocked. Once
in writing, their complaints to city health, code and safety
officials made the misery hard to ignore.
Where
was God?
William
Safire | NYT
In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents
sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness
around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was
God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil
and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What
did these people do to deserve such suffering?
After
a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of
lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire
wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who
still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian
Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds
of millions of religious believers.
Turn
to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some
2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith.
The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people
would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died
young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?
The
poet-priest who wrote this book began with a dialogue between
God and the Satan, then a kind of prosecuting angel. When
God pointed to "my servant Job" as most upright
and devout, the Satan suggested Job worshipped God only because
he had been given power and riches. On a bet that Job would
stay faithful, God let the angel take the good man's possessions,
kill his children and afflict him with loathsome boils.
...
The
point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there
in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge
the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled
a book on this "The First Dissident.")
Indeed,
Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial
with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: in
a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man
with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed
directly to him in Scripture.
Frankly,
God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message
not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement.
Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal "I read the Book
of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it."
The
powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when
I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of
the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst
thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" The poet-priest's
point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to
darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his
human creations free to work out moral justice on their own.
Job's
moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating
that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly
stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes
me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome
book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity
promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)
Job's
lessons for today:
(1)
Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a
fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.
(2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in
the Bible and need not undermine faith.
(3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth
is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's
cynicism.
