Op-Ed

Beneath the water’s surface

By Corbin Blackford    

AP Photo Archive

The left behind are on the front page. Finally.

Last Sunday, in front of President George W. Bush, millionaire preacher Bishop T. D. Jakes said Hurricane Katrina had changed the nation’s view of the poor. In his sermon, reported Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, Jakes said, “Katrina, perhaps she has done something to this nation that we needed to have done. She has made us think, and look, and reach beyond the breach.”

New Orleans’ poverty problems surfaced during the evacuation for Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into Louisiana on August 29^th. Impoverished blacks were largely the ones left as Katrina hit. In an opinion in the Christian Science Monitor, John Hughes wrote about one group of largely black, displaced evacuees in Ohio who had possessed no means to leave New Orleans. They not only rented their homes but also lacked cars and jobs.

Problems with the evacuation were not limited to the individual level—government slipped as well. As Nicholas Riccardi and James Rainey reported in the Los Angeles Times, a hurricane DVD was meant to educate the supposed 134,000 New Orleans’ residents lacking vehicles. However, the hurricane arrived before the DVDs did.

Reasons for the failed evacuation are complex. Problems existed at individual as well as governmental levels.

These problems in dealing with the evacuation serve as a metaphor for problems in dealing with greater American poverty.

In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler discussed the responsibilities of both the individual and society. He wrote, “It is difficult to find someone whose poverty is not somehow related to his or her unwise behavior….And it is difficult to find behavior that is not somehow related to the inherited conditions of being poorly parented, poorly educated, poorly housed in neighborhoods from which no distant horizon of possibility can be seen.”

Just as the state and individuals failed in working together to evacuate, so do the state and individuals fail in working together to relieve poverty.

While conditions in Louisiana may be especially tough since, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, it is the state with the fourth highest percentage of Americans in poverty during 2002-2004, America as a whole faces poverty problems. Ronald Brownstein reported in the Los Angeles Times that the number of impoverished has risen for four years.

Quoted by Brownstein, Illinois Senator Barack Obama expressed the need for a solution.  “‘I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say … we are willing to experiment and invest in anything that works,’” said Obama.

Obama’s words are similar to those of Shipler. “If problems are interlocking, then so must solutions be…. Only where the full array of factors is attacked can America fulfill its promise,” wrote Shipler.  

Government officials must work with one another and with the impoverished to make sure that poor peoples’ efforts pay off.

The left behind are finally on the front page. It is just too bad it took a deadly hurricane to put them there.

Katrina relief organizations:

American Red Cross

Direct Relief International

USA Freedom Corps

The Salvation Army

Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.

Lead supervisor:      Prof. Claudette Artwick

Reporting supervisor: Prof. Doug Cumming

Editing supervisor:  Prof. Pamela Luecke

Technical supervisor:  Michael Todd