The Last to Go, The First to Go

Oh, they were not far from shore, when they heard a mighty roar
And the rich refused to associate with the poor
So they put them down below, where they'd be the first to go
It was sad when the great ship went down.

As discussed briefly before, the overwhelming majority of those who suffered and died in flooded New Orleans were poor and black.

The powers called for evacuation, but as far as I know provided no buses or other means for those without cars or cash to evacuate. There is a picture of dozens of school buses, sitting in a flooded parking lot, useless and probably destroyed. There is no doubt that before the fact, these people were forgotten.

This population has been left uneducated or miseducated, to an extent that has to be seen to be believed, and through decades of dependence on government, largely passive and with a family structure in tatters. Initiative would come, if at all, only sporadically and unpredictably, and much of it outside the law.

So not only did the buses not come, the people who were left were the ones least likely to take the initiative and find some way to get out, and once stranded, find some way to take care of themselves.

For these deficiencies, only state and local government, and long-term social policy, are to blame.

Afterwards, help seemed slow in coming, and bizarre events occurred, some truly harmful, like the decamping of a good portion of NOLA's notoriously corrupt and inefficient police departmenta and the failure to put a halt to looting immediately; others symbolic, like the tone-deaf failure of the President to return to Washington post-haste, something he symbolically did for an unaware Terry Schiavo. (I say symbolic because communications are no doubt fine in Crawford, and only time and inquiry will tell if help was delayed because of anything W did or failed to do). There's no evidence, to date, to support the maniacal conspiracy theories that these events were motivated by racial animosity or indifference; but post-mortems may reveal the rôle played by lassitude and incompetence.

The middle-class folk and those with family ties around the nation will no doubt do fine. They'll bunk with relatives or make good use of the kindness of strangers, and find jobs, schools and hope wherever they end up. Others won't do so well.

This is not a question of race, at least not only of race. Look at the Lost Boys of the Sudan. But resettling the uneducated and the dependent, used to living on little but having it supplied by others, may be difficult. I'd like to see some practical work from the Jacksons and the Sharptons, who are quick to cry racism.

Where the solution will come from is from competent and generous public officials (like those in Houston) and the goodness and imagination of individuals and small groups, like churches.