I am not the only one who has moved from sorrow to anger. The president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Rev. William Sinkford, issued this pastoral letter on Tuesday.
I know there are those who think the UUA and its leadership are too political. Maybe this timeline of the response to this disaster will help them see why we cannot afford to ignore politics. After all, if we do not raise our voices in objection to such injustice, what do our principles really mean?
Unitarian Universalism is not and should not simply be a place we hang out and make nice. We are called to use our voice and our power to make the world a better place for all people. We may have different answers to the question, “How should we build a better world?” But if we use our pluralism as an excuse for inaction, we are complicit in letting greed, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and other evils control the shaping of what is and what will be.
ministrare 
Bill Sinkford has a deep understanding of Unitarian Universalism going back for decades. The US Constitution that was written by liberals holds that we the people hold our political leaders accountable, Unitarians and Universalists never forgot that that their values mattered and witnessed to them.
Gandhi argued that those who argue that religion should have nothing to do with politics don’t understand religion. Well maybe they have a different religion, but liberal religion has political consequences, because our values are transformative. Some religions might be about being comfortable with injustice but after two hundred years we have the right to say “we have values.”
Rev. Sinkford’s letter is one way of looking at the New Orleans mess. May I respectfully offer another, rather lengthy, perspective?
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000129.html
I have a problem with the timeline that you linked to. It keeps referring to Condoleeza Rice and what she was doing instead of addressing the conditions in New Orleans.
Condoleeza Rice is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, so she would have no power to do anything about Hurricane Katrina.
It seems like that timeline is meant to make people angry instead of give a clear assessment of the facts.
I’m angry enough. I don’t need people to twist the views of things to make me even angrier.
A better timeline is the simple one from Snopes.com. http://www.snopes.com/politics/katrina/nagin.asp
I am still pondering the Sinkford letter. I appreciate having my consciousness raised, and particularly appreciate those times that we identify a need we can fill and then we act to fill it. Thanks for initiating this conversation so we can all think through the issues together.
Amen to that. . .