Eye of the Storm.

By Michael Grunwald

Some blowhards with pulpits insist on attributing acts of God to the sins of the victims, but recent days have provided awful reminders that natural disasters don't discriminate. A cyclone killed 50,000 in Burma; an earthquake killed 15,000 in China; a tornado killed seven in Picher, Okla. The only generalization that can be made about all the victims is that they were unfortunate. As it says in the Book of Matthew, "God sendeth rain on the just and the unjust."

But natural disasters still reveal a lot about the societies they strike. Hurricane Katrina didn't expose the wickedness of New Orleans, but it did expose the city's pre-existing poverty, the unwise destruction of its wetlands defenses and the dysfunction of the agencies that built its levees and responded to the storm. By contrast, the rebuilding of Greensburg, Kans., as an environmentally sustainable town after it was flattened by a tornado a year ago reflected American resilience and ingenuity. Hurricanes and tornadoes are random events, but preparations and responses are not.

Picher has its own American saga, the tale of a former lead-mining center that became the nation's most contaminated Superfund site. Its creek was the color of Tang, its population dwindled from 20,000 to 800, and the government was starting to buy out its holdouts in order to raze the ramshackle town. On May 10, Mother Nature beat it to the punch. Now everyone seems to agree that the town of Picher is dead and its residents will be compensated fairly. You can't blame them for the twister.

You can't blame the Burmese military junta for Cyclone Nargis either. But you can blame it for seizing aid shipments and refusing to admit aid workers. Nargis exposed the horrors of Burma--not only for the cyclone's victims but also for the survivors, whose lives are imperiled by the junta's inaction and who will still be stuck there after the world loses interest. It's a reminder of Lord Charles Bowen's take on the Book of Matthew:

The rain, it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella But mainly on the just because The unjust steals the just's umbrella.