Rediscovering America's Poor

Hurricane Katrina lifted the rug in America's house of prosperity. Under it, were tens of thousands of poor people which had heretofore been invisible. We have heard of mud slides or earthquakes or tsunamis killing tens of thousands of people before, but they were the poor of far away nations, crammed together in sprawling neighborhoods of ramshackle housing. The mud, or quake or waves would mow them down in droves.

Middle class TV viewers could gasp and shake their head at the plight of the poor, yet feel somewhat insulated. They, after all, lived in tidy detached single family houses, not cheek-by-jowl shanty towns. That's how the poor foreigners live.

Katrina exposed that America has its share of sprawling hovels and poor. New Orleans crafts its image as the upbeat party town. Jazz, food and old French colonial buildings. It's thousands of very poor people lived in invisibility until the storm brought in hundreds of reporters and cameras.

"The poor ye have with you always," Jesus said. He was (and is) right, of course, but our own image of America is as narrow as New Orleans' image of itself. America's favorite image of itself is as the land of prosperity, materialism and wealth. Yet, we have our thousands of poor living out subsistence lives in lesser housing than most middle class homes' garden sheds.

Rediscovering these poor, has re-energized the age old debate over what to do about them. Democrat banner-wavers crank up their volume on calls that the federal government should be fixing everything -- making the poor no longer poor. Yet, those poor had always been there.

America can pull together to repair damage, rebuild neighborhoods and improve levees. But mixed in, are the old socialist recipes to try and remove poverty. This sort of thinking is just as insulted and smug as the middle class TV viewers -- that if the people of New Orleans hadn't been poor, none of this would have happened to them.

Humbug. Plans to improve how America responds to disasters are well worth the effort. Disasters will continue to happen. Let's not get distracted into social programs. Improving a family's living standard won't help them evacuate faster, nor will it feed and house them after evacuation.