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They're going fast!
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.
Sorry but I don't know how to do a hot link using html so here they are using the straight posting method.
Article about Houston and the evacuees.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/4973356/detail.html
Article about the FBI warning and the fight at the school.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/4975025/detail.html
I remember a thread about the school fight...
It is amazing for a small town gal like me to imagine that housing for that many can be found as quickly as it was.
Houston is an amazing place! Hot, humid, buggy, takes up a large....really large land mass.
I was raised in Houston and I have a love/hate relationship with it. When I was growing up the people were wonderful and there was so much for a child to do. Back then most people considered Houston as redneck central but school children were taken to the Houston Symphony several times a year. I remember going to the opera too. I'm old enough to have gone to baseball games at Colt 45 stadium before the Astrodome was built. Now the Astrodome is no longer used for baseball.
On the other hand there was always something strange about wearing shorts on Christmas Day. I live in Oklahoma now and I like having seasons. I don't miss the traffic. I don't miss it taking an hour and more to get across town when traffic was running smoothly.
Sounds like Phoenix, and I have some experience there with the weirdness of wearing shorts on Christmas day.
Even weirder to be spraying fake snow on the front window displays ;~D
What we have witnessed with Katrina is a massive failure of LEADERSHIP. Louisiana has had the same opportunity as every other state to plan and prepare for this type of event. Unfortunately, many emergency management positions go to untrained political appointees who quite frankly dont know which end of the fire truck the water comes out of, much less what the capability of their response agencies are. They see big federal bucks and nothing more. Of course the folks in the trenches (first responders) can see this and the morale of the services is affected as you would expect. Why else would so many of the NO police and firefighters desert their duties.
As to the race-baiters, media whores and liberals who are blatantly using this situation for political gain I have nothing but contempt for them. Hopefully the majority of America will see them for what they are and they will be relegated to the dust bin of history.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
Martin Luther King Jr.
My tea leaves aren't working well this day, and trying to run your comments through Altavista's babblefish isn't clarifying what you're trying to say. Would you mind expanding the comment?
One of my favorite quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. that's all.
Thanks for your post.
It is a VERY sad day when we lose two individuals of their caliber because of a few losers who post here on FR. I have frequented their threads probably more than most others on FR. I hope with some time they will choose to come back and continue to contribute to the forum. It would be a shame to let a few jerks ruin a great forum. The few jerks certainly are not true conservative thinkers.
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They're going fast!
Glad to hear it :~D
LOL, Miss Marple -- you don't know how many times I have said those very words to myself!
I have held several jobs since living here, and in each instance noticed how intimidated my co-workers were. They lived in hand-wringing neurotic fear of displeasing their supervisors. They worried constantly if anyone perceived them as breaking the rules, and about getting a written warning placed in their personnel files. The employer's omnipresent surveillance cameras created even more tension. A worker might think he was alone at his workstation, only to suddenly get an angry call from his boss at a remote location or an unexpected write-up from a surveillance officer peering down from overhead. Big Brother is always watching!
Independent thought and initiative were always discouraged. You were supposed to consult with your supervisor at the drop of a hat and never try to analyze or solve anything by yourself. ("You can't do that, you have to tell Miss So-and-So!") I lost count of the number of times I would see a customer deliberately ignored or abandoned because they asked an employee about something that wasn't directly in their job description.
One line that I used to hear over and over among civil servants was "We're not paid enough to think!" And since the factor of low wages is undeniable -- and might even explain why so many employees deserted their posts during the hurricane -- there's actually a grain of truth to that callous statement.
Most of all, never question anything! I'll never forget the night I tried to figure out the reason a problematic situation existed, only to have a co-worker stop me in my tracks with "You diggin' too deep!" It made me feel like I was in an outtake of "Roots," like someone was going to drag me from my cubicle, tie me to a stake in the middle of the cafeteria, and flay me in front of hundreds of employees just to make an example of me.
After I left one job with a particularly strict atmosphere, I rehashed it with a former co-worker who summed it up very well. He said, "Up North where you come from, you talk about 'thinking outside the box.' Here, we are taught from a very early age to 'color inside the lines.' Anything else will get you into a lot of trouble."
The thing is, the "plantation mentality" doesn't know any color barriers in 21st Century Louisiana. I've seen equal bullying from both black and white supervisors, equal intimidation in both black and white employees. There have been so many times that I've mumbled under my breath, "Don't these people know it's the year 2005 -- the Emancipation Proclamation was signed centuries ago!"
The attitudes of the workforce certainly account for a lot of what we've seen in recent weeks. The "plantation mentality" is as strong as it ever was in Louisiana.
I'm glad that you pointed out that not all the evacuees are welfare recipients. The first wave of people who came here to Central Louisiana arrived in their own vehicles, checked into hotels at their own expense, and generally spent the weekend before Katrina hit behaving like tourists. The first articles that came out of their arrival crowed about the boost of tourism dollars into our local economy. You couldn't get a table at many restaurants around Alexandria when these suburban professional families arrived.
Now, unfortunately, everything has turned 180 degrees, let alone upside-down. Today, many of these people stood in line at the Pentecostal headquarters in Alexandria for what was called the "Katrina Job Fair." Despite their circumstances, a substantial number of people came to booths sponsored by 50 Central Louisiana employers. While there were indeed some ragged-looking teens in t-shirts applying for fast-food jobs, there were mostly nicely-coiffed women and well-dressed men filling out applications. Despite losing it all, they've kept their pride and dignity as they rebuild their lives. The only downside to this is that their unanticipated presence in our community makes it harder than ever for local residents to compete for these same jobs. In fact, it was quite surprising that 50 employers with vacancies could even be rounded up under the circumstances.
Meanwhile, here's a story about evacuees who ended up in Dorchester, Massachusetts:
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/home/articles/2005/09/15/establishing_a_home_again_from_scratch/
Interesting quote:
''Everyone is focused on the evacuees, but no one is focused on people like these," says Mayor Thomas M. Menino, whose office is coordinating services for, among other displaced people, those Gulf State residents trickling into Boston without the knowledge or assistance of state officials.
"We have no sense of the numbers," the mayor says. ''They're not attached to any organization, and they're trying to start a new life for themselves, and they don't know where to go for help. They have to think about jobs. Educating their children. Health insurance. They come here without any identification or ability to make a living."
lsucat, I wish you and your family the very best of luck in getting your life back on track after Katrina!
It's all too sad to comprehend.
Bookmarking my way.
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