Twice victimized
IN DISASTER movies, people flee. In real disasters, thousands of people have nowhere to go. In the land of SUVs, they don't have cars or enough cash for a bus ticket.
Just as the need for levee repairs was forgotten, the poor in New Orleans were long overlooked, ignored until Hurricane Katrina left them stranded in a drowned city and awash on national television.
The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, knew that poverty would hinder the evacuation of the city's 445,000 people. He asked churches, relatives, and friends to help poorer residents leave -- a noble but grossly inadequate request. In Katrina's wake, New Orleans has been swallowed by water, and residents who had little now have virtually nothing.
New Orleans is a legendary city of jazz, Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras-fueled indulgences. The city also has deep economic problems, including a 2004 poverty rate of 23 percent, nearly twice the national rate of 12.7 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
In December, the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, convened a poverty summit, asking ''residents from all walks of life to join her for a solution-oriented discussion." Participants in the summit trotted out the damning statistics. One-third of the jobs in Louisiana pay below-poverty wages. Sixteen percent of births are to teenage mothers. Blanco promised to devise a road map for ending poverty. Now the state needs a road map plus thousands of lifeboats.
In Biloxi, Miss., Katrina has turned swaths of the city into fields of rubble. With an area poverty rate of 15 percent, the city has used casinos to pump money into the local economy. But, like New Orleans, Biloxi, a city of 50,000, is grappling with looting, death, and the knowledge that anything remotely ''normal" is months or years away.
Once calls for food and water fade, calls for homes, work, a future will surely rise. Government money will rebuild cities. But it will take this and more to rebuild lives.
Although the country never decisively won President Johnson's war on poverty, it's time to renew the battle. The poorest victims of Katrina should get help climbing several rungs up the economic ladder. They may need education, jobs, or low-interest home loans. Foundering teenagers need compelling alternatives to crime, drugs, or pregnancy.
Securing individual prosperity also requires wiser spending of the nation's wealth, investing in infrastructure needs and in environmental management, including the protection of wetlands, which can weaken the impact of floods and hurricanes.
Katrina has been devastating. But the storm's legacy could be one of mighty resurgence: a country that emerges from the floods with less poverty, a country that is better and stronger than it ever was.
