Getting Past Katrina

Columnist and author Juan Williams argues that poor people must confront a poverty of spirit.

“For a brief time our guilt and shame seemed to put America on the political edge of a new try at something like a 1960’s-era Great Society program. But that newfound energy was squandered amid racial and political arguments.

First, the left made the case that the reason the government was failing to help the desperate, bedraggled poor people left behind in New Orleans was that the faces on television were black — and a Republican administration ruled in Washington. The power of that argument failed when it became apparent that poor white people, both in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast, had also suffered because of FEMA’s incompetence.

The right, meanwhile, depicted the poor — that is to say the black poor, because TV cameras focused on the big city — as looters, rapists and criminals. But when those claims turned out not to be true, there was no return to the core issue of how to help the poor escape poverty.

Pew Research Center poll (conducted the week after Hurricane Katrina) found that two-thirds of black Americans and three-quarters of white Americans believe that too many poor people are overly dependent on government aid. Inside those numbers is the sense that welfare programs meant to help the poor create a dependency on handouts, draining people of the confidence, will to work and values that are crucial to success.”