Beside the interstate leading into this abandoned city there's a self-storage warehouse whose flimsy walls were peeled away by the hurricane. The contents are almost undisturbed, stacked neatly in their exposed compartments. You can see all the inconvenient things that people stowed out of sight and out of mind.
That's what this unreal disaster did to New Orleans and the whole country. Things we tried to tuck away and forget about are suddenly out there for the world to see. As a nation we can deal with them or not, but we no longer have the option of pretending they don't exist.
Chief among this inconvenient baggage is poverty. After seeing who escaped the flood and who remained behind, it's impossible to ignore the shocking breadth of the gap between rich and poor. It's as if we don't even see poor people in this country anymore, as if we don't even try to imagine what their lives are like. Think about what just happened -- a record-book hurricane was bearing down on the most vulnerable city in the country, and it didn't dawn on officials at any level that many people didn't have cars in which to flee, money to stay in hotels or upstate friends with enough space to take them in.
To be poor in America was to be invisible, but not after this week, not after those images of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and airport. No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably does wonders for the extremely poor.
What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don't have a boat?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801535.htmlAnother must-read from the Washington Post's Gene Robinson.
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