When Man faces disaster

I'm taking this out of context, from an article at the New York Times that focuses largely on how poorly officials responded to Katrina. What struck me as I read these paragraphs, however, is that we human beings think we are so strong, so indestructible, when really all flesh is as grass.

"It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad," said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. "I'm 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I've never seen anything like this."

Around the nation, and indeed the world, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastation stretched beyond the usual political recriminations and swift second-guessing that so often follow calamities. In dozens of interviews and editorials, feelings deeper and more troubled bubbled to the surface in response to the flooding and looting that "humbled the most powerful nation on the planet," and showed "how quickly the thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away," as The Daily Mail of London put it.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, I Peter 1:24.