Poor people often invisible
Hurricane Katrina’s unprecedented aftermath affirms two truths: If you’re poor in America, you’re invisible until catastrophe thrusts you into the glare of television lights, and nobody ever takes official responsibility for this institutional neglect.
Thousands of victims of the killer storm that destroyed New Orleans and parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida had little before Katrina struck. Now they have nothing. It’s unrealistic to think that, having finally been rescued from hell, they’ll be resurrected by the same dysfunctional local, state and federal governments that consistently failed them in normal times.
Sending New Orleans’ displaced population to Houston, Atlanta, Dallas and every other American city with its own needy population of invisibles compounds this tragedy and may well destabilize those hard-pressed communities.
Every affected politician from President George W. Bush on down will appoint commissions, point fingers, and demand answers about why rescue efforts took so long, why so many poor, black Americans died during the delay, and what their future holds.
Such hearings allow Republicans and Democrats to rant at one another during televised dog-and-pony shows. These predictable staged dramas provide duck-and-cover for politicians now being blamed for their slow reactions to the New Orleans disaster. Inevitably, milquetoast hearing reports calling for fundamental changes to broken government systems will be discounted by an entrenched bureaucracy.
As a journalist long familiar with such past finger-pointing, I’ve learned that the root causes of all post-disaster bumbling are the same: a lack of leadership, turf wars, bureaucrats who won’t take personal initiative, unqualified political appointees in key posts, poor communications, no coordination and no prior planning.
It’s the same scenario for Katrina. When the hurricane hit, residents with means took responsibility for their own safety and used personal resources to get out of New Orleans. The city’s invisible citizens — trapped by their poverty, fear and lack of resources — didn’t. Already government’s lowest priority, nobody even thought to help them escape.
Poor people don’t have money to make campaign contributions. Often they don’t vote. They require public services but are unable to support them with taxes. They are at the lowest economic rung. They don’t press political hot buttons, so have minimal clout. A system that ignores them in normal times always fails them in a crisis.
What millions of us here at home and billions around the world saw as we watched New Orleans’ stranded poor being rescued out of their ramshackle neighborhoods exists in every other American city. It’s also present in our stagnant small towns and behind the locked doors of elderly citizens barely surviving on meager fixed incomes.
Politicians know that. So do the rest of us. But as Abraham Lincoln noted, “People get what they want.”
If we are to continue portraying the United States as a fair and equitable nation, we’ve got to fix a social system that Katrina has revealed as horribly broken.
A first step is to hold President Bush, and every other politician, accountable for their sweeping promises of federal, state and local aid to Katrina’s survivors.
To prevent past injustices suffered by New Orleans’ invisible poor from being compounded by future betrayals, we must also start paying attention to what our public servants do in our name.
This buck stops with every one of us.
You may write to Tad Bartimus c/o The Women Syndicate, P.O. Box 10169, Columbia, Mo. 65205.