KATRINA EXPOSES OUR CALLOUS TREATMENT OF THE POOR

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This was written by Cynthia Tucker who is on Bill Maher's show tonight:

Here in America, the land of opportunity, we gave up on the poor more than two decades ago. Under the careful tutelage of Ronald Reagan and other conservatives, we learned that the poor were simply too lazy to improve their prospects and their misery was their own fault.
We gave up on the white poor and the black poor, even though black Americans had suffered under three centuries of unconscionable oppression before a brief period -- less than three decades -- when they began to be treated as fully human. We gave up on the Native American poor, though they had been the victims of a historic savagery amounting to a holocaust.

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In fact, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans used just those words to describe the hurricane evacuation plan authorities put in place for residents who didn't own cars. Reporter Bruce Nolan wrote in July: "City, state and federal authorities are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation."
As least Nagin and his fellow city officials were trying to figure out how to get the poor out of town if disaster struck. Working with an anti-poverty agency and the Red Cross, they envisioned a private initiative, Operation Brother's Keeper, in which churches would enlist members with cars to offer rides to the have-nots.

By contrast, the ill-informed, incompetent Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is still puzzled by all those poor people who refused to order their chauffeurs to crank up the Bentleys. Last week, he told CNN: "... I think the death toll may go into the thousands. And unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the evacuation warnings. And I don't make judgments about why people choose not to evacuate. But you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there."

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