The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina makes it abundantly clear that we lost the war on poverty long ago and we openly ignored it. For over two decades, we glorified corporate raiders and preached the benefits of tax cuts to the mostly wealthy and corporations. We also loved to talk about how we were all being brought down by our government social programs, while forgetting that it was tragedies like Katrina that led our forefathers to start these, in many instances, life saving programs. The hardest hit areas, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana, have the highest poverty rates in the nation: over a third of the population of New Orleans lives in poverty and Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country and ranks last in the well being of children.
How we have neglected our poor and black is shown unfiltered by foreign press. The U.S. government has been offered help from Russia, Europe, Cuba, and even Tsunami stricken countries have offered to help. Many other countries, including Spain and the U.K. have offered to donate millions of barrels of oil to the U.S. However, the administration has amazingly not accepted such assistance. (Condoleeza Rice, in a carefully worded statement said that the U.S. “has turned down no offers.” However, they have also not accepted many of the offers. The spinning continues while a city is dying.)
This tragedy is emblematic of the two Americas John Edwards talked about over a year-and-a-half ago. The anger over this situation is just not beginning. According to Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe on the NewsHour: “the anger that is going to come from the realization that virtually all public policy — state, local, federal, where this area is concerned, has been against the public interests for decades. And the realization that government is one of the reasons we have government has been violated by virtually everything government has done for decades.“
Just as the Progressive Movement of the late 1800s was ushered in by the Johnstown flood and the New Deal was ushered in after the Great Mississippi flood of 1927, a new movement has started where we refuse to forget the least of us. America’s progress is judged by how we treat our poor and underprivileged and not how much we pay those on the higher rungs of the economic ladder. Our priorities will change because they have to.
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