Are you mocking me? ;)
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.
Excellent Post. We have the ideas that can truly lead people out of poverty...not short term fixes. They just haven't heard it yet. We need to offer people a real chance for hope, not condescension and blame.
Only a small minority sees this event as the result of a right -wing conspiracy of overt racism. Only a small minority thinks that those blacks got what they deserved. The majority - and indeed, the only people whose opinions are worth listening to - recognize that this is a tragedy caused by nature, and exacerbated by the gap between rich and poor found in America and by incompetance by New Orleans, Louisiana, and Federal officials.
Pay no mind to the racists - either the ones who take the entitlement mentality or the ones who think those blacks got what they deserved. No one gives a crap what they think. They don't speak for me.
In your dreams. There are a LOT of people on the Left who thrie and survive by keeping class warfare alive. They need to keep people as permanent victims, unable to deal with the results of their own decisions.
When the grand duke or whatever of the KKK speaks, people just chortle. When the Lefty race pimps speak, it gets heavy coverage and their words repeated as if they are gospel truth -- you have but to look at the MSM coverage of the usual idiots, plus some new ones, to see I am correct.
You need to take of your rose-colored glasses. And soon.
Some people paint with a very broad brush indeed..I consider those posts as seriously as I do posts about turning the whole ME into a glass parking lot..Not at all.
I indeed have been fortunate..and had a family support system to see me through a rough spot..and have seen some others through some rough spots..
There are those who need us to be the family to get them through a rough spot..Perhaps those who can improve their lives can be helped by people like you and your fellow workers.
I have had to move out of my home for months because of a house fire...I have had to help a beloved family move in one day from their home heavily damaged by a tornado..Kind friends took them in, as housing was unavailable where they worked due to large numbers of people left homeless.
Texas is being a good neighbor at the moment.
I thank all the volunteers trying to help them.
There are rotten apples , sure..but many just need a leg up right now...and recovery from a very traumatic uprooting and loss.
I will decry waste and fraud..and lawlessness..but not generalize and lump together..There is hope and I thank God for those who work to help people help themselves..
OK - they're off.... Now what? What do we do about it?
Agreed.
Thanks for that posting...I also, was greatly saddened to see some of the really nasty discourse on FR about Katrina...when we try to lump all people together, because of their race, or where they live, or what educational level they have reached, or what their financial status is, we do then avoid seeing the real people that are there...we cannot and do not know why people were caught up and in harms way caused by Katrina...
You know I am a white woman, my husband is a white man, we always worked and paid our own way, and tried to raise our two white boys right...a terrible series of incidents(the death of one of my children, job loss, mental illness), caused us to be on 'Welfare' for a few years....we felt saddend and shamed to have wound up like that, but there we were...dependent on a welfare check, food stamps, and Medicaid....we lived in a little 3 room shack during this time, we bought my remaining son what he needed to go to school and live his life as a child only because my husband and my self wore shoes with holes in them, and often skipped meals so that our son would have enough food...we were poor, and it was scarey...
Thankfully we worked our way out...and today are happy that we were able to provide our son with a college education, and me and the hubby are both retired with a nice nest egg for our senior years...but all those years ago, my family was in a bad position, and often felt desperate and hopeless...we did not give up, we knew what life before welfare was...but for many, for whatever reason, they remain poor and do not climb up...but had my family been in New Orleans in our welfare days, and had Katrina hit, we would have been one of all those families who needed assistance...and I would have greatly resented the nasty smart aleck remarks by many freepers, who think that they do know why some people are in a bad situation...
I also miss rdb3 and mhking...I think their departure is a great loss to FR...
Thank you :~D
I appreciate your posts, always. :~D
Gracious, this is the first I've heard of this. FR is diminished without them.
Good post. Great quote.
Well, I can hope they'll come back....
If they want to talk issues, this is the place to be.
Will do.
Oh my!..I did not know...I am heartbroken.
Prayers for our FRiends to return.
Thanks....I sure do miss mhking...I had just a few short discussions with him, but always found him to be one of the best posters on FR....his loss is really great, and it diminishes FR...I read his last post, and he just seems so sad, and unhappy with what he had been reading on FR....like he said, he just felt so 'tired' of it all...
I hope he one day returns...
Are you mocking me? ;)
Yeah -- it was a truly sad day when I learned of Mike and Rod's departures.
Heh.... No - not at all, I agree with you. :~D
I'm just gong to chime in and add that I, too, have been disgusted with some of the overt and subtle postings that have made it to FR. It's become clear that some of the things the Left says about conservatives (racist, sexist, homophobe, and other smears) are, in fact, true in enough cases to keep the stereotype alive.
Like everyone else seeking to understand a complex situation, the first goal should be to get the relevant facts on the table. One of those facts, which you wither did not know or neglected to mention, is that there was an Evacuation Plan for New Orleans.
Had this Plan been carried out, using the buses designated for it, most of the deaths in the City, and all of the horrors in the Superdome, would have been prevented. That did not happen because of the failures of two public officials, Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, both elected with the overwhelming support of the citizens who were abandoned in the teeth of Hurricane Katrina.
There is a political subject you have to deal with, which does not appear. What are the dynamics by which the poor people you sympathize with, tend to elect political leaders who will either be incompetent, or corrupt, or both?
The suffering people of New Orleans WERE betrayed, but not by circumstances, or society, or the nation, of the Bush Administration. They were betrayed much closer to home, by people they entrusted with their welfare. That is a central fact you need to deal with. You haven't even mentioned it.
Congressman Billybob
I thought I was keeping up pretty well..but I missed it all.
Geez, you mean MHKING and RDB3 are gone? JUST DAMN. Those guys are worth 10x some of the people that are still here.
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