Posted on 09/10/2005 2:04:11 PM PDT by pissant
America's underclass dies prematurely every day.
They perish from diseases that take them before those who can afford better health care. They succumb to the violence that takes the young in too many neighbourhoods. They are casualties of rampant drug use born of despair.
But, until last week, they did not die in such numbers, 24 hours per day on cable TV news. Their bodies didn't lie unattended on city streets or wash up in floodwaters. They weren't herded into areas of unimaginable squalor because they didn't have the means to do better.
Hurricane Katrina has exposed America's cursed underbelly, its multitudes of poverty-stricken and hopeless, forgotten by a government bent on offering tax breaks to the wealthy.
Already, there are suggestions Katrina could help swing a social pendulum back in the United States, a pendulum that has swung in favour of less tax, smaller government and cutbacks on entitlement programs since the late '60s, a philosophy that flourished with the 1980 inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
"This has the potential to be a watershed moment," says Rosa Brooks, a professor and social commentator at Georgetown Law School in Washington.
"Just as the Pentagon quite smartly embedded reporters with soldiers in Iraq to ensure they get the soldiers' point of view, Katrina embedded hundreds of reporters in poverty, watching poor people suffer in the dark. They are powerful images. The reading and viewing public is responding to something it has not seen in the mainstream media."
Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland, an author and expert on class and racial politics, is also optimistic that the images of the poor suffering in New Orleans could spark a national debate on an issue that has been ignored for too long.
"This hurricane dredged it all up and shoved it in people's faces like nothing before in our history," he said. "I am reasonably confident that some type of sea change could be afoot. What you're seeing here is the blowback of the failure to deal with social policy over the years."
Katrina is a tragedy on many levels, not the least of which is the national sense that the underclass was abandoned by their government.
The people dominating TV screens from the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Centre had remained beneath the radar for both politicians and the largely white, upper-middle-class national media.
The national media "discovering" poverty in America is a little like Columbus "discovering" America, Brooks said. Both were already there.
In the wake of Katrina, one major poll has already found a post-hurricane turnabout in the priorities of the U.S. electorate.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found this week that for the first time since Sept., 11, 2001, a majority of Americans — 56 per cent — want their government to concentrate on domestic issues. When it asked the same question as U.S. President George W. Bush began his second term in January, that number was 40 per cent.
If the move away from social issues and safety nets and toward the sacrosanct U.S.-style rugged individualism is cyclical, it has been a long cycle.
Most historians say it dates to the backlash against the civil rights movement of the 1960s and took hold with Reagan in 1980 when the war on poverty became a war on the poor.
It continued through the Bill Clinton years when the former Democratic president governed from the centre-right in an acknowledgement of the Republican-dominated Congress and the American mood.
Coincidentally this week, while poor Americans were drowning and awaiting help, census numbers were released to little notice, confirming the United States' official poverty rate rose to 12.7 per cent in 2004 from 12.5 per cent in 2003. In raw numbers, that is 37 million people living in poverty — more than the population of Canada.
In 2004, the poverty rate for blacks in the United States stood at 24.7 per cent, three times the poverty rate of whites. Although many are careful to emphasize the situation in New Orleans is a class struggle, not a race issue, the fact remains the city is 68 per cent black and one-in-four is below the poverty line.
But Nicholas Eberstadt, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said as horrible as the images may be, there is no link between Katrina and poverty.
"It sounds to me more like a failure of government rescue policies," he says. "I'm not sure the catastrophe tells us a lot about the living standards in the U.S."
If there is a shift in priorities in the United States, many analysts say, senior Democrats must seize the moment and move beyond their short-term fixation with the bungled response by Washington. There are some signs this could happen.
"Is this a country that is measured by the size of the tax cut we give to the rich?" asked Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House leader.
Edward Kennedy, the veteran Massachusetts senator, said Katrina has "torn away the mask" that hid Americans who are left out and left behind.
Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee and former presidential hopeful, was among the first to link class and colour as barometers of the Bush administration response.
"The ugly truth (is) that skin colour, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not," Dean said in a speech. "The question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America? We have not swept poverty away in this nation. We have simply swept it under the rug."
Charlie Cook, a political analyst who produces an independent political tip sheet, wrote in this week's National Journal that Katrina did not create new problems for Bush as much as it simply exacerbated existing perceptions.
"First (is) the perception that the president lacks an understanding of average people and the poor, and second, the perception that the war in Iraq is siphoning resources and attention from what should be domestic priorities," Cook wrote.
Conservatives, however, say this call for a national conversation is not new and none of the arguments have changed.
"All the demands for a `new conversation' or `national discussion' on race and class are fairly one-sided," wrote Jonah Goldberg of the National Review in an on-line column yesterday.
"This is the same old pattern. Liberals, white and black, lecture conservatives, white and black, about how conservatives are racist (or race traitors) if we don't agree with them.
"Anybody who lays any significant measure of blame with any but the usual culprits — institutional racism, white racism, white institutional racism, etc. — is denounced for `blaming the victim.'"
This clown needs to walk the streets of Vancouver BC and see the hordes of canadian welfare punks shooting up herion with the full blessing of the Province.
Take a long look in the mirror Howie, you'll find your answer.
Excuses excuses--It is time they take responsibility for their own lives--period.
Life still has its Darwinian moments. Do I evacuate with the Mayor or not?
Oh. I thought this was about unborn babies, but it's about full-grown adults.
That little rat faced punk would crack a mirror!
Expert on race-baiting is more like it.
I hope the conservatives in this country push hard for an end to the dependence producing welfare system. It's the worst thing since slavery for the black community.
I know for a fact that most people who work for the Toronto Star are hard-line Stalinists. I urge all Canadians to stop buying this rag. It's full of lies based upon their ideology and their anger at the failure of Soviet communism.
They hate America and capitalists. They want to see us defeated in Iraq just and they helped defeat us in Vietnam.
Yup, but don't count on the conservatives doing anything. They hope to get the votes too.
Mexicans illegal criminal aliens will work hard to get what they want and for the future. Fat, dumb and dependent blak field African-Americans won't. The blacks in New Orleans were simply waiting for ole massa to come back to tell them what to do. Maybe, Katrina has broken part of that patern!
No. Killing babies is noble and righteous according to the marxists like this author. It's when people kill themselves with drugs and bad behavior that riles the left, and they blame the people who are telling the idiots not to do it.
Owl_Eagle
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
Let me guess. An affirmative action hire himself.
This describes our current Federal, State and Local government? Seems that gov't, like a cancer, continues to grow. Also seems like total tax receipts increase faster than inflation. Entitlements? - Are those like Rights?
Even generally clueless Bill O'Reilly calls them a hard left (meaning pro-commie) rag!
I mean the people; you and I and all the real conservatives, holding the fire to the feet of the effeminate politicians.
I pray that the conservative ideology can make great inroads into the black population. I hope so for their own good!
The truth is, the domocrats rely heavily on uneducated and dependent lower classes. When they break free of the welfare state, too many become republicans....unless they live in Hollywood.
Many states have done a stellar job in purging the welfare roles. My guess is Louisiana isn't one of them (at least for the NO area)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.