But it's kinda cool to see your name in the paper anyway...
True obscenity
Rabbi Avi Shafran should stop beating around the bush and just come out and say it in his Sept. 16 article “It’s hard to look past the prurience of the ‘Big Easy.’” He thinks God used Hurricane Katrina to tell us that we shouldn’t enjoy smutty entertainment so much.
I’m not sure if the good rabbi has looked at a map of the devastated area, but New Orleans’ French Quarter occupies a tiny part of it — and that sinful neighborhood survived the catastrophe fairly well intact. So a Category 4/5 hurricane seems like a rather clumsy and imprecise way to deliver this wake-up call.
Let us learn real lessons from this disaster, not use other people’s tragedies to fight another round of the culture wars.
Yes, we should take a long, hard look at ourselves. We as a society have failed — not because we enjoy a Mardi Gras parade or a little skin on television but because we have tolerated the growing disparity in our society between the richest and the poorest. A disparity that cost thousands of people their lives because they didn’t have the means to escape. That is truly obscene.
Katherine Falk | Oakland
