The Other Side of Charity's Coin

[Southpaw Bookworm]

. . . Everybody, it seems, wants to help Walker and thousands of other hurricane survivors who were stripped of everything they owned. The images of grief and destruction -- so vividly brought into homes by TV -- have moved people to tears and to action, natural responses to a catastrophe of such proportions, according to scholars who study the subject. But this eager generosity toward Katrina victims also offers a contrast to American society's general inattention to other homeless people, say these scholars and advocates for the poor.

"What crises do is bring out this human instinct for compassion and the desire to help -- what can you do? . . . Why don't we care about ongoing poverty? It seems to me it is much more abstract. 'The poor are always with us, it's such a big problem.' You feel like you can do something when there is a crisis," said Elizabeth Boris, director of the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute.

The element of worthiness -- or lack of it -- is also at work.

"Certainly a piece of this is the attribution of blame, that Katrina victims are unlucky, they were living in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Sam Marullo, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University. "The institutional poor we have here in D.C. and every other city around the country, there is a sense that they are at fault . . . they didn't do something right, they didn't get an education, they didn't follow the rules."

Advocates say the homeless have noticed -- and many resent -- the difference in perception and treatment. "Local homeless people are saying, 'Nobody cares about us -- we were here all the time,' " said Imagene Stewart, who has 17 homeless families from the area at her House of Imagene in Northwest Washington. "For Katrina people, they find money. We've been out here begging for years."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502278.html

[MountainLaurel]

1. Kick

There have been several articles on this subject: Assisting victims of a crisis while otherwise ignoring the poor around us.

[Delphinus]

2. This is a good article.

And quite true - they say that the poor are always with us and it seems such an insurmountable problem.

I think the more fundamental question is why do we have poor people? In this land of plenty, why do so many go to bed hungry? Why do some not have indoor plumbing? Why can we reach into our pockets for Katrina, but not for the homeless?