This semester I’m taking a religion class on sin. And one topic that keeps coming up is the sin of omission. This particular type of sin refers to ignoring any social injustice you witness.
Growing up here, I’ve seen plenty of that. And I think I’ve done more than my share of work to help improve the state of this city.
We all know that New Orleans is a place full of problems that existed long before the storm we consistently blame as a cop-out. So we can use all the help we can get.
What completely flabbergasts and annoys me are the comments made by some of my classmates who say that it’s not their business or their responsibility to help.
But it is. I’ve noticed that this is the mindset lots of Loyola students have. They think they only need to attend school and have fun living it up in New Orleans, sucking up as much New Orleans culture as they can in four years. That, to me, is a sin of omission.
Being a student at Loyola, a Jesuit institution, requires more. It is so much more than experiencing Mardi Gras and confining ourselves to this quaint little world in Uptown New Orleans that has many of us blinded to the issues on the other sides of St. Charles Avenue.
Being here challenges us to get involved in our community. Yet so many of us stand under the bridges on streets with famous names to watch the parades from infamous krewes go by. But we don’t bother to acknowledge the people who are usually under those bridges, who call those locations home.
We don’t think of the people who are forced to move and are herded like livestock by city officials who think it’ll make the city look bad to have homeless people under the bridges during parades. But it’s OK for them to be there the other 11 months of the year.
We are guilty of the sin of omission by not going to visit the public schools located within blocks of our campus to help out the kids who will never have the opportunity to use the iMacs in the Monroe library. Many of them will never go to college at all, let alone a private university.
Some of them won’t make it out of high school because no one tells them they’re worth the hard work it takes. How difficult would it be for us to tell them? According to a few of my classmates, they have better things to do with their time.
I’m far from being sin-free. But don’t think that because you don’t steal, kill or fornicate, that you are. Because when you live so close to injustice every day and you make a conscious decision not to do anything about it, you’re living in sin.
Kris Johnson is a mass communication junior. She can be reached at
