Posted on 09/14/2005 3:32:33 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
~Martin Luther King Jr.
Yesterday as I sat and waited for an appointment with the director of a local agency for the homeless, I saw this quote on a poster on the wall. It's a great quote. I stared at it as I continued to think about the situation in New Orleans and the surrounding areas devastated by hurricane Katrina.
I've found the debate on Free Republic and elsewhere nearly intolerable in the wake of Katrina. As a political conservative with a long job history of helping the homeless and the poor, I have a much more complex view of people and poverty than some here. I am not one of those 'lucky' people who see only one small aspect of it and could therefore post quickly and sharply about what they saw. Those lucky people see losers who are receiving the deserved outcome for their poor decisions. They see lesser human beings and incompetent democrats as the simple and definable cause. It's not ~our~ problem, it's ~their~ problem.
When I looked at the faces of those people at the convention center, they were not foreign to me. I know them. I've spent years working with people who are poor and/or unemployed; some temporarily, some permanently…. Some good, and some very bad, and some still walking the line who could go one way or the other. They'll choose the path that looks like it will pay off. I've had impact at that moment of choice, in my work, and have helped some of my clients go the right way. Not all, but enough that I felt my desk and my job were not a waste of space and money. I learned a lot there.
I've learned from their stories that I had some things in common with them. I too, had spent some time being unemployed with a negative bank balance. I'd never sought help for it from some agency or charity, but that was because I had something they did not: A successful family and successful friends, who not only were there to help me when my life took a downturn, but also were there to expect more from me. These people, by and large, didn't have that. Many do not know anyone who ~is~ successful enough to help them. They may have seen successful people on TV, they may see them drive by in nice cars, but to the chronically poor those people look as foreign and hard to understand as street people do to the occupants of the nice cars. Neither sees the other as someone they could be. IMHO, they're both wrong.
But lets go back to the people in the nice cars for a minute, because they're the once I'm talking to now. The people posting on this forum who think they see the whole problem as the fault of the refugees. The ones that say it's not ~our~ problem, it's ~their~ problem. With that solved in their mind, they set out to post simple rants that make clear their view that they are superior to this problem, that they would never have been trapped the way the people at the convention center were. Those posters have seen all the conflicting images I have, but can file it neatly into their world view. They see only losers and looters, they see only people who they can't imagine being. And many punctuate their posts with simple racism that speaks more accurately than I would wish, of views that are still alive and well inside the republican voter base. To those whose only input is to classify this as a race issue I say you are not only outdated and shallow in your worldview, but unhelpful to those who will lead this country. You offer nothing we need.
I reject their views as not only wrong and uninformed, but as emotional and impractical as the world views often expressed by Jessie Jackson. To those who say these people are responsible for their own helplessness, or undeserving of help, I say "OK – close your eyes and think that. Now open them. Oops. They're still here. We still have to deal with the poor refugees of this storm. So now what?"
What do we do when we have to condemn an entire city and move them, willingly or not, somewhere else? It's easy to loathe the welfare programs these people have been living on when they were invisibly in the bad part of town…. Now the barrier that kept them from view is gone. The city that hid them from us has been condemned…. And man there's a lot of them.
I know well the people who will move in to help these people. They're good people, for the most part. I've worked with them and learned from them. When I was very new and conservatively naïve about charity and welfare and poor people, they told me the truth. The only difference between a social worker's outlook and the average suburban conservative's outlook is their assigned role in actually dealing with it. What the rest of us just opine about, they have in their inbox. They know who they're dealing with, they know which people can be helped, and they know which ones will not be helped. They help the ones they can, and they work their butts off and have a lot of good impact. I'm not talking about the leadership at these agencies, the ones who have to write grant proposals and talk in flowery language about helping the poor… And I'm certainly not talking about the pompous blaming bafflecrap we get from politicians. I'm talking about the front line workers… the ones who I've spent hours with, in break-rooms and in bars after hours, talking about our days.
Those who are very new to dealing with the poor often fit into one of two perspectives. They either(1) think that by classifying people as losers they have completed their participation in the subject, or they (2) think they want to help, and they think their acts of charity will be universally appreciated and accepted with the enthusiasm a stranded golden retriever would have toward their rescuer. These people aren't golden retrievers. They are people who bring with them such baggage as they could carry, often times the only baggage they have left is that they carry in their own minds. Some of them think life has been very unfair to them. And you know what? Some of them are right. These people have had a crappy thing happen to them with this storm.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
~Martin Luther King Jr.
These people have been tested, and are still being tested, by this challenge. Some have indeed reacted to the situation with utter incivility. The media loves to focus on them, and so we saw lots of looters. It's tempting in a crisis to focus on the one thing that is the most obvious, to the exclusion of everything else. As a pilot, I learned to avoid fixation and keep working the problem in emergency procedure drills, that fixation on one aspect of the problem can lead you to fail to deal with the rest of the emergency. Those lessons apply to this situation as well. Yes, we know there was a criminal element to this crisis. But also happening are other crises that don't stop happening just because we aren't looking at them. Real people who's real ability to get over this crisis is being tested. They need our help, and they are worthy of it. They aren't foreign to most of us, if we sat down and listened to what they have been through. I could be them. If I had been caught by this hurricane, this 'evacuation order' at many points in my life, I'd have been unable to consider, at a moment's notice, to pack up what I could carry and leave my home, perhaps indefinitely, without help from anyone. I am a republican, I am white, I am female, and I could be one of them.
What do we do now? As republicans, what do we offer these refugees? See, they are not the only ones being measured by this crisis, we are too. We want to lead this country, we ~are~ leading this country, and it's in our inbox.
I can tell you what I ~don't~ think we should do. I don't think we should talk down to these people or talk down about hurricane refugees as some class of people who all fit in the same box. Simply writing them off as the undesirables is not an option. That's WAY too easy to say, and solves nothing.
While the rest of the shallowly political on both sides argue and blame and say ugly things, I want conservatives to be measured as being better than that. The democrats in this country haven't had a good idea in years. Now is our chance to look at this enormous crisis with the practical, compassionate, Christian ideals that I know we possess. We need to pitch in and help, with both our effort, and our good example, and we should not tolerate those on either side who would put these refugees in a box, whether it's out of low expectations, or out of fear.
This has been a long rambling post, I know, for those who have stuck with me, but that's what I was thinking about as I stared at the Martin Luther King poster at the shelter.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
~Martin Luther King Jr.
Agreed.
And I'm off now, for the night anyway.
Good night Sam.
Good night, Hair.
I still use FR as my primary source of news, but I no longer bother with most of the political opinions here. They differ too much from my own, and frankly, I have better things to do than to try and change that. It would be a losing battle.
Anyway, my two cents.
But the point is, regarding poor folks, who are that way for whatever reason, whether their "fault" or not (and that gets almost philosphical in some sense, when single parents pass on poor habits to their children, whose at fault?), is whether those with no means to drive a car out of the impending storm, and no public transportation is offered out, and then not much gets in afterwards for five days, and there is no law and order), "deserve" the "fruits" of all of that? I don't think so, and I don't think many Americans do. In an emergency, and saving life, and acute danger and pain and suffering, one's bank account should not matter to the extent the public square is reasonably able to make it not matter.
The penalty for being impecunious because one is feckless, should not be death, or extreme abuse. That is cruel and unusual. It shocks the conscience, at least my conscience. It should not, and must not stand, to the extent with reasonably prudent efforts, it can be avoided.
At least that is where my moral compass, and my sense of what is right, leads me.
Count me in on that sentiment, and thank you for posting this.
EXCELLENT
Then on the same day to hear about the people who had been evacuated to Atlanta and given the debit cards spending $800 each to buy Louis Vitton hand bags. I don't think any o fus donated money to have it spent in that manner.
I'm not poor, but I work hard for what I have (and my parents didn't help me -- so not having parent give a hand up isn't an excuse.
It has to come from within... and that is where the failing is... our Socialist welfare system has created what we see in NOLA, but NOLA isn't unique. Every large city in this country has the very same problems.
I don't profess to have a clue how this can be reversed, but it must be.
BTW, most poor in this country are white. It's Jessie, Al, Maxine, Shiela, etc., who would have you think the only poor, disadvantaged people in this country are black.
If we woke the country (including the Dems) up and started tomorrow trying to reverse this it would still take 20 years, because it requires starting with the children...
and speaking of children, how do we stop poor young women from perpetuating the problem to another generation with multiple out-of-wedlock children who are raised without a father because in a welfare state a married couple don't have the same advantages in the system as the unmarried.
I guess I've ignored most of the racist comments associated with Katrina or just didn't notice, but what I've seen in article after article has been a frustration with the President being accused of being a racist and thus being slow to respond to these victims of the storm when, if you know anything at all about George W. Bush, you know he is not a racist... and to see journalists buying into that myth is maddening.
Indeed it is.
And that's what makes you a good man. The philosopher/pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote about just such conditions that you relate as he was riding on a refugee train full of Polish workers and their families fleeing from Spain during the Spanish Civil War in 1936:Quote..
"I sat down face to face with one couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and had fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants. Forth from this sluggish scum had sprung this miracle of delight and grace."
"I bent over the smooth brow, over those mildly pouting lips and said to myself: This is a musicians face. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become?"
"When by mutation a new rose is born in the garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine. This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned."
"I went back to my sleeping car. I said to myself: Their fate causes these people no suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this. I am not weeping over an eternally open wound. Those who carry the wound do not feel it. It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here, is outraged here. I do not believe in pity. What torments me tonight is the gardener's point of view. What torments me is not this poverty to which after all a man can accustom himself as to sloth. What torments me is not the humps nor the hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, of a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered."
(From: "Wind, Sand and Stars" by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 1939.)
I think that you see what "Saint-Ex" was seeing on that train fleeing with the poor from civil war. You're in good company, my kind friend. If you weren't, you would not hurt.
P.S. Do you think anybody'd believe this stuff from a couple o' "saddle tramps?" Naw, neither do I..................;^)
Like the Jews of ancient Jerusalem, they (the blacks in New Orleans) have forgotten and disgraced their leader's goals.
Very well said.
This is true. What LBJ did to minority's with AFDC (welfare) was a hate crime. The Democrats now grow minority children on poverty farms for future voting purposes. It will take time for the poverty farms to become pastures and tended by different farmers. The Democratic Party and the two poles of the Republican Party do not have the plows for this ground. It's the great middle class, if we can keep it.
If the federal government wants people to reconsider building New Orleans in its original spot, they should just stop with the subsidized flood insurance. Oh, who am I kidding; ice hockey will be played in Hell when they do that.
Anyway, I've found (in my diverse work environment) that there are those who, when informed of facts, incorporate them into their knowledge base, and those who want to paint with a large brush, willing to accept the spoonfed "information" that the media presents, without accurately presenting facts. (i.e they become the story, not reporting it.)
Those who are willing to learn, and grow, they are worth cultivating. Others, who aren't willing to listen to facts, I don't bother with. They are a lost cause, and aren't worth trying to wear my voice out with. You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can't make them accept facts.
Are you saying they left because of posts on FR?
Yes, they did.
Good post!! Here, here. And thank you for making it.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. ~Martin Luther King Jr.
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