Poverty - The lowest common denominator

It does not matter where you live - if you are poor - you always come out worst in any situation. Who knew US had so many poor people until Katrina hit and you see them spilling like human flies from the superdome.I had never been to New Orleans - always wanted to but now I will have to wait for the rebuilding to visit it. Living in the bay area, with our busy schedule, we never get to see the poor sections in our own cities. We are so insulated and we think everybody has lives like ours - you know, go to work and rest on the weekend. We don't venture to parts of the cities where the poor live; we don't see them so we think they don't exist.

The logistics are simple - if you are poor. It does not matter even if you heard warnings about level 5 hurricane - where can you afford to go anyways? Everything costs money - you can't get out of the city and move to safer grounds unless you have money to wait out the hurricane. So they stayed put - thinking that all they have to so it wait out the storm. But the levees failed and all hell broke loose.

Watching TV, I find it hard to beleive that this is happening in the US. It looked like any disaster area in any other part of the world. And most of the faces were black - the poor of New Orleans. And it just hit me that if one is poor - it does not matter that you live in America - you will get the brunt of disasters. Being poor, is the worst crime of human kind.

The looting and crimes - how can we explain it? We do not know what it is like to live like them - we don't undertand the deteriotion of their souls by their past. How would any of us know what it is to live with an addicted mom or dad- if we have never expericed it? Long before this calamity hit, many of the poor lived lives that were filled with pain and unfulfilled needs on a daily basis and it is not right to judge them when they loot when disaster struck.
I cannot say - " why don't they help each other instead of looting and making things worse?". Some of them may have always fended for themselves as they may have grown up in homes where the parents were already lost to drugs or were in jail.

Katriana showed us that even though we live in the US and think we have wonderful lives, there are so many people who live in poverty and indignities just like in poorer countries. We have a lot more of marginalized population than we let on - our TV cameras rush to India, Thailand and other countries to show the poor people there while they pretend that these things don't exist in America but nature literally blew the lid off- of that myth.

We are just like any other country - we have a huge population of the poor - we just hide them better. I hope we all donate - everything helps.