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When Katrina hit Louisiana, I lived in Baton Rouge. We didn't get hit nearly as bad as New Orleans or other points east, but it still knocked out power and messed up the area for a while. We had an influx of people from the NO area who were staying here to ride out the storm, and I volunteered at a Red Cross shelter to take care of some of them. We had people who had evacuated days ahead of the storm, in addition to many who fled the area in the days after the storm passed.
Never in my life had I encountered such abject human misery and a group of people who felt they had been abandoned. The shelter I worked at was in the gym of a community center just outside the city. I heard more stories than I care to remember about the hell people went through during that time - stories of living on roofs to evade flood waters, of knowing their neighbors were dead, of being treated like animals by people who were supposed to rescue them. Such people became so grateful for the small things we gave them, from toys to their children to a pack of underwear.
I was glad to help, but it made me sick. I will never forget the images of people so desperate, the sounds of people asking why God had forsaken them. As I think back, as I do every year when August comes around, on what I learned from that period, it is this: no country as wealthy as ours, that purports such a spirit of togetherness and charity, should have citizens who are so callously ignored by the rest of the country. Yes, plenty of aid came in during the weeks after the storm, but that so many people were living on the edge of privation and could so easily be forced into these conditions, cramped and sleeping on cots, packed like sardines in a room the size of a high school gym, sickens me to the bone. Of course, the storm's aftermath eventually dropped out of the national spotlight, and people forgot.
It is perhaps this experience, more than any in my life, that has made me unwilling to compromise on issues regarding the poor or the inequality of income in this country. New Orleans has many poor people, and the effects of their poverty went deeper than their mass migration into crowded shelters: it fostered a culture of national indifference, where others questioned the value of even having the city of New Orleans as a viable entity, rife as it was with "useless black people" and others people could turn their noses at. Yet, if a similar disaster happened to a more well-to-do city, I doubt we'd see the level of disdain when the residents needed help.
There is no greater scourge to this country than poverty. Not only does it make the task of everyday existence hard, it makes it virtually impossible to bounce back from a calamity like Katrina. My only hope in life is that the time I spent with those people, before they were moved to Houston, did them some good, and that I and the others who worked there showed them a side of humanity they hadn't seen too often. I know there is a fair amount of acrimony on this board as of late, but I make this one request: for no reason should any of us sacrifice any of our principles when it comes to helping our poor.
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