Posted on 09/10/2005 2:04:11 PM PDT by pissant
America's underclass dies prematurely every day.
They perish from diseases that take them before those who can afford better health care. They succumb to the violence that takes the young in too many neighbourhoods. They are casualties of rampant drug use born of despair.
But, until last week, they did not die in such numbers, 24 hours per day on cable TV news. Their bodies didn't lie unattended on city streets or wash up in floodwaters. They weren't herded into areas of unimaginable squalor because they didn't have the means to do better.
Hurricane Katrina has exposed America's cursed underbelly, its multitudes of poverty-stricken and hopeless, forgotten by a government bent on offering tax breaks to the wealthy.
Already, there are suggestions Katrina could help swing a social pendulum back in the United States, a pendulum that has swung in favour of less tax, smaller government and cutbacks on entitlement programs since the late '60s, a philosophy that flourished with the 1980 inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
"This has the potential to be a watershed moment," says Rosa Brooks, a professor and social commentator at Georgetown Law School in Washington.
"Just as the Pentagon quite smartly embedded reporters with soldiers in Iraq to ensure they get the soldiers' point of view, Katrina embedded hundreds of reporters in poverty, watching poor people suffer in the dark. They are powerful images. The reading and viewing public is responding to something it has not seen in the mainstream media."
Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland, an author and expert on class and racial politics, is also optimistic that the images of the poor suffering in New Orleans could spark a national debate on an issue that has been ignored for too long.
"This hurricane dredged it all up and shoved it in people's faces like nothing before in our history," he said. "I am reasonably confident that some type of sea change could be afoot. What you're seeing here is the blowback of the failure to deal with social policy over the years."
Katrina is a tragedy on many levels, not the least of which is the national sense that the underclass was abandoned by their government.
The people dominating TV screens from the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Centre had remained beneath the radar for both politicians and the largely white, upper-middle-class national media.
The national media "discovering" poverty in America is a little like Columbus "discovering" America, Brooks said. Both were already there.
In the wake of Katrina, one major poll has already found a post-hurricane turnabout in the priorities of the U.S. electorate.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found this week that for the first time since Sept., 11, 2001, a majority of Americans — 56 per cent — want their government to concentrate on domestic issues. When it asked the same question as U.S. President George W. Bush began his second term in January, that number was 40 per cent.
If the move away from social issues and safety nets and toward the sacrosanct U.S.-style rugged individualism is cyclical, it has been a long cycle.
Most historians say it dates to the backlash against the civil rights movement of the 1960s and took hold with Reagan in 1980 when the war on poverty became a war on the poor.
It continued through the Bill Clinton years when the former Democratic president governed from the centre-right in an acknowledgement of the Republican-dominated Congress and the American mood.
Coincidentally this week, while poor Americans were drowning and awaiting help, census numbers were released to little notice, confirming the United States' official poverty rate rose to 12.7 per cent in 2004 from 12.5 per cent in 2003. In raw numbers, that is 37 million people living in poverty — more than the population of Canada.
In 2004, the poverty rate for blacks in the United States stood at 24.7 per cent, three times the poverty rate of whites. Although many are careful to emphasize the situation in New Orleans is a class struggle, not a race issue, the fact remains the city is 68 per cent black and one-in-four is below the poverty line.
But Nicholas Eberstadt, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said as horrible as the images may be, there is no link between Katrina and poverty.
"It sounds to me more like a failure of government rescue policies," he says. "I'm not sure the catastrophe tells us a lot about the living standards in the U.S."
If there is a shift in priorities in the United States, many analysts say, senior Democrats must seize the moment and move beyond their short-term fixation with the bungled response by Washington. There are some signs this could happen.
"Is this a country that is measured by the size of the tax cut we give to the rich?" asked Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader.
Edward Kennedy, the veteran Massachusetts senator, said Katrina has "torn away the mask" that hid Americans who are left out and left behind.
Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee and former presidential hopeful, was among the first to link class and colour as barometers of the Bush administration response.
"The ugly truth (is) that skin colour, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not," Dean said in a speech. "The question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America? We have not swept poverty away in this nation. We have simply swept it under the rug."
Charlie Cook, a political analyst who produces an independent political tip sheet, wrote in this week's National Journal that Katrina did not create new problems for Bush as much as it simply exacerbated existing perceptions.
"First (is) the perception that the president lacks an understanding of average people and the poor, and second, the perception that the war in Iraq is siphoning resources and attention from what should be domestic priorities," Cook wrote.
Conservatives, however, say this call for a national conversation is not new and none of the arguments have changed.
"All the demands for a `new conversation' or `national discussion' on race and class are fairly one-sided," wrote Jonah Goldberg of the National Review in an on-line column yesterday.
"This is the same old pattern. Liberals, white and black, lecture conservatives, white and black, about how conservatives are racist (or race traitors) if we don't agree with them.
"Anybody who lays any significant measure of blame with any but the usual culprits — institutional racism, white racism, white institutional racism, etc. — is denounced for `blaming the victim.'"
Might as well be. Makes me embarrassed to be a UMd alumnus.
Does anybody blame Katrina for any of these deaths? Oh, I know, it's George Bush's fault and Karl Rove's fault and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's fault and Rich Republicans' fault, etc. I just haven't heard too many people throw Katrina into the mix.
If we are going to go into debt, I want to spend the borrowed money on killing terror-scum, not handing out more welfare to ungrateful citizens.
Wait til they change their name from Terrapins to Pansies. It's discriminatory to use animals for mascots now. ;o)
The left have proven to me time and time again that they HATE our country!
Quite to the contrary, as anyone with the slightest. dimmest knowledge of Louisiana politics would know, Democrat politicians in that state pay VERY close attention to the "underclass." Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and Senator Landrieu would never have gotten anywhere near elective office without actively courting the "underclass" in New Orleans.
Oh, yes, Hurricane Katrina has exposed something bad and serious about American government. It shows that the combination of incompetent politicians pandering to incompetent voters produces public officials who will allow people to die -- because they are too incompetent to prevent that.
My article on the same subject is below. It is far more honest, and grounded in the facts.
Congressman Billybob
I just read your piece. Good work.
Well, I certainly try but too many times they are sheep in wolves clothing and they avoid getting burned with more lies.
Thank you. Glad you liked it.
John / Billybob
"How Not To Be Poor" - Walter E. Williams
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050511.shtml
"I'M A VICTIM!!!!!!!!" take care of me. What a bunch of BS......... Cry me a river.........just my opinion..
You are welcome. Keep it up!
Good post Diana! Walter Williams usually cuts right thru the clutter!
Not just your opinion, thousands of freepers agree witchya! :o)
OPENING PRAYER - KANSAS STATE SENATE
"Heavenly Father, We come before you today to ask your forgiveness
and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to
those who call evil good," but that is exactly what we have done. We h ave
lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We confess that: We
have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it Pluralism.
"We have exploited the poor and called it the Lottery.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building
self-esteem.
We have abused power and called it politics.
We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called
it freedom of speech.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and
called it enlightenment.
"Search us, Oh, God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from
every sin and set us free. Guide and bless these men and women who have been
sent to direct us to the center of your will and to openly ask these things
in the name of your Son, the living Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen."
Cowboy......Up!!!!!!!! guttersnipes.......
I hope they still say that prayer in Kansas!
Exactly! :o)
Gotta run, marmar, thanks for stopping by!!
Enjoy your weekend!
I wish I knew him personally. He's one of my heroes in this world. ;)
I must agree. I live just outside of Toronto and I'm ashamed to say that this rag is the most successful daily paper. Although it may speak for many in that city, please know that all Canadians don't believe this tripe.
Further to the Vancouver idea. The author doesn't have to go quite that far. There seems to be multiple gang related shooting incidents inside Toronto every single weekend ever since Toronto elected a mega-socialist mayor.
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