I needed some comforting a few days ago, so I opened my Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell essays. Say what you will about the ill-lit avenues of the soul that seeks solace in Orwell, but when your thoughts want ordering, he gets the job done. In How the Poor Die, a reflection on the indignities and miseries the needy suffer when they become ill, he shows the poor as objects, crowded into unsanitary wards, worthy of care just a notch above negligence. As human beings, they fade into invisibility.
We prefer our poor invisible; usually they are reliably so. We don’t want to see them and they don’t want to be seen. This is the signature article of our covenant with them.
New Orleans is the story of the breakdown of that agreement.
Last week the invisible became visible.
We watched as they did what they were told, when New Orleans implemented the Charles Darwin Evacuation Plan. Those with money and transport got out; the poor got a football stadium of questionable seaworthiness.
As the crisis developed, the poor took shape. They grew faces, they found voices. They wanted their babies to live, their grandparents to get medical care. They wanted a meal and a drink of water. They wanted to get away from the filth. They wanted to sleep in a place without corpses.
We wondered how the government could fail to bring relief to New Orleans when the press could broadcast from its streets. As it turns out, the answers didn’t lie in standard human incompetence, bureaucratic muddling, or indifference.
While the nation watched its poor die, to the President they remained invisible.
The disconnect feels unforgivable.
One grim feature of the American Dream is that we never lose our suspicion the floorboards between the ground floor of financial security and the dirt cellar of poverty are not entirely dependable. Many of us believe we are one or two bad breaks away from joining the ranks of the invisible; we recognize much of our good fortune as an accident of birth. We now know our government can be blind to what is easily accessible on a television set. To be fair, the President was just a few days behind the rest of the country in recognizing the poor. Our fear is that we, if left behind in a New Orleans, wouldn’t last that long.
Posted by Bobby Farouk at September 5, 2005 04:05 AMAnother face of the poor from today's paper:
At the Salvation Army, dozens of the city's homeless people were among the volunteers working with few breaks.Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 5, 2005 08:31 PMJason Johnson, a 22-year-old who is staying at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless downtown, said while volunteering, "I've seen love, the most giving people I've seen in my life.
Regarding the Charles Darwin Evacuation Plan, it looks like that actually was the plan:
City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 6, 2005 10:22 AMIn the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. "You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. "But we don't have the transportation."
And why were there no "transportation resources" for such a purpose?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 6, 2005 06:42 PMI certainly can't answer that any better than you can, but suspect a combination of rotten priorities, cronyism at all levels, and a small-government philosophy applied in the least rational conceivable form, myself.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 7, 2005 03:14 AMYeah, it's interesting, though, how displaced law students are being admitted to top law schools at the last minute, for free, just to make sure they don't miss a semester or two. That started happening I believe not too more than a day or two after others were dying at the convention center.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at September 7, 2005 10:50 AMA lot of professions are looking after their own. Architects and realtors similarly. Seems like a kind of guild mentality takes over when someone has to decide whom to help out of thousands of possibilities. That of course is putting it politely.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 7, 2005 02:14 PMA more charitable way to view it is that people try to do what they can.
One of my friends runs a bed-and-breakfast near campus. Last week a trio of bedraggled Norwegian exchange students showed up looking for a place to stay. They'd arrived at a New Orleans campus, rented a car so they could move into their dorms, and then had to evacuate. They spent the next several days wandering around northwest Louisiana sleeping in their car and making phone calls back to Norway to figure out what to do next. Eventually someone in their university got them accepted at the Univeristy of Texas.
We have no way of knowing what their family members and faculty contacts would have done with the time and effort they spent taking care of these students. Possibly the effort spent took away from time they'd have spent raising donations for flood victims. Possibly the administrators at the University of Texas who took their calls and arranged their admittance, scheduling, and housing should have spent that time leading a Dunkirk-like procession of jacked-up pickups and SUVs east on I-10.
I admit I felt a similar emotion when reading the Cliopatria notice for faculty fellowships at the "Institute for Advanced Studies" at the University of Minnesota. "We can be maximally flexible" &mdash Hrmph! How lucky for them!
On further reflection, though, I really can't begrudge anyone the help they get. Should I be annoyed that a job fair is being held at our convention center for evacuees only? Hey, what about our own unemployed!? This sort of attitude not only makes the best the enemy of the good, but it's also problematic when you realize how little you know about what else these donors are giving. If the school is deputizing people to do pro-bono work for the poorest evacuees, should we rail against their admissions expansion?
The fact is, we don't know what else these donors are giving. All we can really do is make sure the needs of the weakest don't get forgotten, which is something we should be doing anyway.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 7, 2005 04:32 PM