Can we get to heaven on the cheap?

3rd May 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
The Louisiana Weekly Contributing Writer

One would think that the world learned some very harsh lessons from the man-made debacle that followed Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the winds of Katrina were an act of God, as insurance people like to say. Actually, events of that sort are more properly an act of nature, since God does not interfere with weather or the other caprices of nature.

But, while the people of New Orleans were exhaling with a collective sigh of relief that the winds had done relatively little damage, the levees that had been built and repaired on premature assumptions gave way in very compromising areas of the city.

“Built on assumptions” means that, constrained by stingy funds allotted by Congress, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed levees that could withstand a category 3 hurricane – maybe. To say the least, they were flirting with the dangerous assumption that nothing greater than a category 3 hurricane would visit the Crescent City.

Abetting an already poor situation of funding, levee foundations in some cases built on shifty soil and peat buckled and broke as water undermined them. That caused the upper reinforced concrete of the levees to break with an explosive report as if dynamited. We all know the rest of that story, how New Orleans fell victim to security on the cheap.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” American philosopher George Santayana assured us way back in 1905. Unfortunately, we have had numerous occasions to repeat this harsh truism. Mustn’t we think that people in positions of high security would learn not to gamble by making security regulations on the cheap?

British Petroleum taught us that most people either seem blithely unaware of George Santayana’s admonition or simply brush it off as stuffy philosophy. BP ignored many warning signs and citations over the past few years. Their fateful gambling resulted in an implosion followed by a powerful explosion three miles down in the Gulf of Mexico.

Again, as the saying goes, “It’s not the crime, but the cover up that does the most damage.” From the very first minute of the oil well explosion, BP CEO Tony Hayward seemed hell-bent on concealing all his security negligence and outright lawbreaking. It is appalling how many lies and subterfuges are needed to cover up illegal activities.

That BP charade went on unabated through the harrowing months of the runaway well’s spewing out 210,000 barrels of oil daily. In an unfolding multi-tragedy, most of that oil was being lost, while that same oil was killing oyster beds and other wildlife and polluting the entire environment, thereby ruining the livelihood of fishermen and hunters.

Down to this day and hour, thousands of people who went broke in the wake of the BP disaster are still waiting for the just settlement promised by BP. Sure, the company has to get around the predator scam artists out there, but there is no excuse for this much delay.

Although very beneficial during the dread tsunami of March 11 and its aftermath, not even their proverbial politeness, patience and protocol could keep the Japanese from falling into the same trap as their Katrina/BP counterparts. Assuming no quake stronger than 7.9 would hit them, they designed their nuclear reactor to withstand that force.

That’s right. Because such a quake had happened but once before in the horrible 7.9 Tokyo September 1, 1923 quake that killed 142,000 people, the physicists and authorities assumed it would never exceed that force. So, too, had they talked about Katrina.

Yes, the utter destruction and sheer terror of the monster 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami that killed some 20,000 people remained uppermost in the minds of the dazed survivors. The island nation of Japan was shoved eight feet away from its normal position.

However, apart from a much smaller-scale experience by the Soviets at Chernobyl, nuclear terror is a totally different kind of horror that the Japanese people uniquely in all the world can talk about from firsthand experience. The 1945 specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hung over their heads as overheated fuel rods threatened to cause a meltdown.

Immediately after the earthquake, the nuclear reactors began to be compromised, even as documents from Tokyo Electric revealed that the company tested the Fukushima plant to withstand a quake up to magnitude 7.9. Too late, they realized their fateful gamble.

Terrified nuclear maintenance specialists immediately understood that they had built their nuclear energy plants safety features at the lowest-assumed safety level. Their deft calculations said there would never be more than a 7.9 quake in Japan, let alone a 9.0. They had made a calculated life-and-death gamble on a brash assumption, and lost.

Our hearts go out to the stricken Japanese just as our hearts went out to the afflicted Gulf Coast survivors of Katrina. Let us pay at least this tribute to them that we resolve never again to try to get by on the cheap with critical things hanging in the balance.

The Dutch learned a similar lesson in the worst way on January 31, 1953 when the Great North Sea Storm overwhelmed their dikes, killing 1,835 Dutch and several hundreds from nearby countries. They, too, had built their defenses on the cheap for the event of a 25-year storm. Wisely, now they have built a 1,000-year storm dike system.

Beware when preparing for a spiritual storm that you don’t fortify yourself for a category 3 storm when the devil is coming with a 5, or that you set up against a 7.9 devil when Satan is shaking your foundations with a 9.0 monster quake.

Doing things on the cheap invariably seems to be more interesting and in many ways more exciting. Yet, the stiff caveat remains that we may have hell to pay for skimping on whatever should have cost a lot more. Quite literally, we may have hell to pay forever if we try to attain eternal salvation on the cheap. Jesus demands unconditional love.

Don’t be cheap, as Ephesians 6:10 warns us: “Put on all the armor that God gives, so you can defend yourself against the devil’s tricks. We are not fighting against humans, (but) against forces and authorities and against powers in the spiritual world.”

This story originally published in the April 18, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.