First LBJ and then Reagan had the "War on Poverty," but we all saw it for what it was, a war on the poor. Twenty-five years later, and here we are with an ever-rising percentage of us living below the poverty line, tens of millions without health care, and all making a wage nowhere close to life-sustaining. It took a disaster of epic proportions, and the disturbing images that it produced, for us to start talking about poverty again. All over the place are little hints and discussions about the role of class and race in the mess left from Katrina, and what role both should play in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Seeing that NOLA is one of the most corrupt cities in the country, making even the corruption of Chicago pale in comparison (well, maybe not pale), and that it has long been run by and for elites (first white, now mixed with the "talented tenth" of the black creole population), it will be a miracle if the city included any of its tens of thousands of poor citizens in the decisions being hatched out over martini lunches right now.

Salon ran a two-part roundtable discussion on how to rebuild, and I thought this from Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, was a highlight:


The Nation this week ran a number of essays about New Orleans and the role of class as well, including a gem by Adolph Reed, Jr., one of our country's most eloquent writers on class and race. I'm reading his book Class Notes right now on recommendation from one of his friends who I know here in Chicago. Reed was born and raised in New Orleans:

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.

[snip]

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Also in this week's Nation, Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenat ask 25 questions about the "murder" of New Orleans, and Naomi Klein calls for a "people's reconstruction." I don't have much hope at this point that the reconstruction will be mindful of class given how rents have already skyrocketed in the city, landlords are evicting tenants before they even return, and soaked-through houses are being gobbled up by hungry developers. It's sad, truly sad, that so many who were left behind when Katrina first stormed in are being left behind again, and will most likely continue to be. When I read Clayton Cubett's blog about his mother's loss, I thought of how many tens of thousands of others like her there are down in the Gulf Coast, and how most of them don't have a child or relative who is financially capable of helping them out.

I was struck by the lack of philanthropy in New Orleans when I first moved there three years ago. It was so different than Chicago, where though there is poverty and shameful segregation, there are also a lot of individuals and organizations commited to social change and working hard in neighborhoods across the city to make life better for the city's residents. When I first moved to New Orleans a close friend introduced me to two of her cousins, local socialites, because she thought they might be able to help me get a job in the non-profit sector. Before moving to New Orleans I was Executive Director of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a small community arts program in Chicago, and I wanted to stay in the same sort of job. They told me in very frank terms that New Orleans was about church and family and Mardi Gras, and that it was to those three areas that money went. Over the next three years I found out how true this was. There was money in New Orleans, no doubt. Dick Cheney came to town for a lunch before the election and raised $500,000 in an hour for David Vitter's successful senate campaign. But the money wasn't going into the communities that needed it the most, unless you count the aluminum doubloons made in China that were thrown out to the masses during the many days and nights of Mardi Gras.

The poverty was obvious in that city to anyone who lived there. I wrote about it the day the hurricane struck, thinking like so many others that New Orleans had once again been spared the worst. Reading over the note I sent to that prominent Sir back in the fifth grade, I thought how my grammar and spelling were better when I was "9 1/2 going on 10" than many of my college freshman students in New Orleans. It was heartwrenching and frustrating to see how low their level of skill was. They had so many interesting ideas, so many stories they wanted to tell, but they were crippled by their failed educations. (And it wasn't just the public school students, by the way.) Many had to take remedial English for several semesters (with no financial assistance) before they could take my freshman comp class. And many others failed my class, then failed again, trying to get to a basic level of competence. That level was far below what was expected of me when I was a freshman in high school (the students had to write a four-paragraph argumentative essay at the community college and a five-paragraph essay at the university). The class ended with a pass/fail exit exam that was neither administered nor graded by the instructors that determined whether the student passed out of freshman comp or had to take it again. Some of us instructors talked about how much cash the public university system was making off of this freshman comp business and how, perhaps, the elementary and high school system was kept at a lower level on purpose to create legions of low-wage workers unable to critically think (and therefore question their lot in the city) while simultaneously being sold the idea that they needed college educations to earn anything more than minimum wage, only to go to college and pay to take the same class over and over again because they were so lacking in skills. It seemed like a racket, and perhaps it was.

Part of me thinks that the evacuees I met in Houston are better off there -- their kids will get better educations, the parents higher-paying jobs. But the other part of me thinks this is a monumental failure of the city of New Orleans and its elites and they owe it to these residents to include them in the city this time around. I've never understood how some people can be so blindly selfish as to think that if they protect their own little corner of the world that's enough. Don't they realize that everyone benefits when everyone is taken care of?

In the Garden District, signs are posted on telephone poles declaring that the neighborhood is "Patrolled by Off-Duty NOPD." We lived on the northernmost edge of the Garden District Private Patrol route, which was fine with us since we heard gun shots nearly every night. (Not that the private patrol made any difference -- after all, we heard gun shots every night even with them rolling around in their Ford SUVs). The first time I saw that sign I thought how absurd it was -- why wouldn't the neighborhood be patrolled by on-duty NOPD? -- and how completely opposite it was to my hometown Chicago where you can't go a night or day without hearing sirens (this is a fortified city with 14,000 sworn officers) and where even in my working-class and immigrant neighborhood cops respond to calls within minutes. I got rear-ended on St. Charles one fall and called 911 to have a cop come by and write up a report. Several cops drove by and told us we had to wait for a "traffic cop" who, they promised, was "on the way." After a full five hours of waiting for the mythical "traffic cop" we drove ourselves to the police station on Magazine and Napoleon and got harangued by the lieutenant in his office lined with Rex posters about how we were supposed "to wait at the scene of the accident and not move the vehicles." It was infuriating, and we were two white women with out-of-state plates and on the main tourist drag outside of the Quarter. Imagine the lack of service in the 9th Ward.

Will New Orleans change for the better? I don't know. But if I still lived there I'd stock up on supplies and pretend I lived in the middle of nowhere with no prospect of governmental support. Because that's probably the way it will continue to be.

Monday night I went to see Lhasa at the HotHouse with my mom, Luis, his wife Diana, and two of their friends. Lhasa clutched her left hand in a fist, held it tight to her stomach while she sang, her face contorted as if each word was a struggle to get out. Opening for her was DeVotchKa, an odd Denver trio that uses a theramin in their show. Nifty!

Before the show I had dinner with my mom at her house, and she gave me this draft of a letter I sent to "Sir," a nameless man-in-charge (government-type, no doubt) when I was "9 1/2, going on 10":


Surprisingly, I never got a letter back from Sir about this idea.

When I wrote this I was in the fifth grade, and my mom and I lived in a railroad apartment on Pleasant Street in Oak Park, Illinois, a self-described progressive suburb just west of Chicago where Ernest Hemingway grew up (and so famously said it was a city "of wide streets and narrow minds"). We had a rickety black-and-white RCA TV and it was in my mom's room. I remember my favorite shows were re-runs of The Cisco Kid, Hawaii Five-O and Emergency!. Apparently I was quite concerned with keeping up with my "information" and worried about what an energy crisis might do to my quality of life.

I don't remember too much about my teacher, Mr. Morelli, except that he always had a five o'clock shadow and it looked green from his black hair and pale skin. I remember, too, that we had to memorize one poem that year and recite it and I chose "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost (which I still remember, by the way). I guess he had us write letters to powerful Sirs too, which I'm sure suited me just fine since I already saw myself as a political person.

I wonder, do fifth graders still send letters to powerful Sirs in their classrooms? And if they do, what do they write about? Their desire to learn "intelligent design" in science class? How prayer should be a part of school? The inequities of our economic system? Or are they still sending letters about our on-going energy crisis and the wars we're waging in relation to it?

S has not received any letters from kids, but he has received a couple from adult strangers, including an elderly woman from New Orleans who knows one of the men on his old lacrosse team down there. She sent a kind letter to him wishing him well and hoping he stays safe. He wasn't sure if he should send a response back now that her city has no mail service and is struggling to emerge from the flood. I'm not certain, but I think he sent her a card anyway, thinking one day it would reach her, even if it came a little soiled around the edges.