About the poor and the rich in our midst

Did the big revelation of Katrina -- that many of us are too poor to get out of the way of a hurricane -- wake up the nation? Will we do something about this blight on our wealthy status? Well, no, not under this administration, who are ideologically driven to favor the rich at the expense of everyone else. But that won't stop some of us thinking about it. Maybe the next president will address it. Meanwhile, here are two views. This guy writes about being poor:

1.
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends' houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won't hear you say "I get free lunch" when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn't mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can't leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn't have to make dinner tonight because you're not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid's school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don't give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger's trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can't find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she'll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you'll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid's teacher assuming you don't have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn't bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that's two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you're being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it's all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn't spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won't listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away.

Being poor is making sure you don't spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.


2. This guy writes about being rich:

Blessed are the Rich ... Beatitudes for this New American Century by Mark Chmiel

Blessed are the theoreticians of "Shock and Awe" and the architects of the war who were ready to cleanse the Middle East of evil-doers -- for they will call each other the sons of God.

Blessed are the cheerful, congenial, and judiciously flattering journalists at the height of their careers -- for they shall be called upon repeatedly at the informative White House press conferences.

Blessed are the Halliburtons, Boeings and ESSI -- for they shall inherit what is due them as the conscientious war-profiteers they enthusiastically are.

Blessed are the ingenious corporate leaders who oversee the global exporting of our values and culture -- for theirs is the Kingdom of Profit, Power, and Prestige.

Blessed are the Administration officials who play hardball, break the law, but still somehow achieve their strategic objectives -- for they shall obtain mercy, pardon, and invitations to offer commentary on CNN.

Blessed are those elite Americans who hunger and thirst for luxury and the ever-increasing freedom to do whatever the hell they want -- for they shall be filled even more than they can possibly imagine.

Blessed are the members of the patriotic Congress and Senate -- for, even though their children will never know the glory of dying for their country on the battlefields of the Sunni Triangle, those same sons and daughters will still know the grandeur of graduating from Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.

Blessed are the pure in ideology -- for they shall see our enemies (Arab-looking, Muslim, conniving and plotting) on every street corner and do whatever they can to destroy them.

Blessed are the visionaries of the oil companies -- for they shall be supremely comforted by the annual profit report.

Blessed are those media pundits, perspicuous intellectuals, and ecclesiastical moderates who sing the praises of the nation's leaders -- for they shall be invited to all the best Washington parties.

Blessed are the astute proponents of the emerging just-torture theory -- for they are defending the uniquely divine rights of America.

Blessed are the rich, who experience rapture with each glance at their portfolios -- for this new American century is all for their happiness.

And so blessed are you, Mr. President, and Mr. Vice-President, and Mr. Secretary, and Mr. And Ms. Everybody Else Who is Along for this Noble Ride of Plunder, blessed are you when your soldiers' mothers say all manner of truth about you, and when more and more of the citizens gather to oppose you, Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward tonight on FOX News.

(Mark Chmiel wrote The Book of Mev. He works with the Center for Theology and Social Analysis (www.ctsastl.org) in Saint Louis. MarkJChmiel@aol.com.)


3. Our Homegrown Third World: the media focus on Hurricane Katrina's victims has washed away the wall that hid the nation's impoverished from the rest of us -- by Rosa Brooks

As Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, American reporters made a startling discovery. The Border Patrol guys must have been sleeping at their posts because, somehow, while the rest of us were distracted by those enchanting info-graphics on the Weather Channel, the Third World managed to sneak into the United States.

Of course, our national leaders were all on vacation when it happened. So, in the terse words of the New York Times' David Carr, "it was left to reporters embedded in the mayhem to let Americans know that a Third World country had suddenly appeared on the Gulf Coast."

USA Today was one of the many media outlets to break the bad news, remarking in a horrified editorial that the scene in New Orleans resembled that in "Third World refugee camps."

On CNN, producer Michael Heard confirmed it: Interstate 10 in New Orleans was "very Third World," with people wandering around "like nomads" and streets filled with water that "just looks unhealthy."

By week's end, U.S. News & World Report was commenting that "as the Third World images of death and devastation reeled across the nation's TV screens," Americans were stirred to "an almost palpable sense of anger." On Fox News, anchor Shepard Smith lamented that things just aren't going to be the same anymore: We can "remove the dead, repair the levee, pump out the water and move on," but we'll be "forever scarred by Third World horrors unthinkable in this nation until now."

Apparently none of these ace reporters has ever set foot in Washington's Anacostia district, or South Central Los Angeles, or the trailer parks of rural Arkansas. Had they done so — or maybe just taken the time to get acquainted with the cleaners vacuuming their offices, or the homeless men selling newspapers at busy intersections — they'd have learned what 37 million Americans already know from personal experience: The Third World didn't sneak in along with Hurricane Katrina. It's been here all the time. Yup, you heard it here first! Even using the federal government's Scrooge-like definition, about 13% of Americans — and 18% of American children — live in poverty. They live in poverty all year round, not just on special occasions like during hurricanes. And they're all over this nation, not just in New Orleans.

When you break down key economic development indicators by income group and race, you find that conditions for poor Americans rival those in developing countries.

For instance, in many American cities, the infant mortality rate among blacks, who are disproportionately likely to be poor, is more than double the infant mortality rate among whites. An estimated 13 million American children went hungry at some point last year, and 11.6% of American children had no health insurance.

But just as it takes a mass famine or a tsunami to generate media attention for the Third World beyond our borders, it took the destruction of a major American city for the media to notice the Third World here at home.

A few doddering old souls may still recall the 1960s, when the media also briefly discovered poverty. Back then, government hadn't yet gone out of fashion, and politicians appalled by stories of privation responded with the ambitious programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Remember the war on poverty?

But — yawn — poverty just isn't that interesting, and by the time of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the war on poverty quietly shifted into a war on the poor.

The Bush administration has waged that war with a level of bellicosity undreamed of even by the architects of the Reagan revolution, slashing social programs while cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Today there are two Americas: the First World one, with its Starbucks and SUVs, and the Third World one, which is generally out of sight and out of mind for journalists cowed by conservative attacks on the "liberal media."

But closing your eyes never makes a problem go away. And sure enough, here they are again, washed up by Hurricane Katrina's tides: America's Third World residents, "so poor and … so black," as CNN's Wolf Blitzer infelicitously put it.

And the media are now discovering that, aside from their lamentable poorness and blackness (a skin shade that in fact characterizes only about 30% of nation's poor), our very own Third World residents are an awful lot like the rest of us. They're ordinary people, working hard to get by, trying to preserve their families and their dignity as best they can in a catastrophic situation.

In the past, media "discoveries" of poverty have ushered in sweeping government policy changes, but many of those changes have been short-lived, fading away as soon as the fickle light of media attention stops shining. In New Orleans last week, scores of reporters experienced firsthand some of the miseries of America's Third World.

Maybe this time around, the media won't forget about the poor quite so quickly.

(Rosa Brooks is an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.)