A Civics Lesson Outlined by Mother Nature
Marisa Treviño

The stench of human waste in New Orleans’ Superdome was said to have been so overpowering that rescuers arriving to evacuate the last of the stranded had to wear air masks just to breathe.

Waiting to be validated by the outside world, thousands of the city’s young and old alike waited for days to be rescued while barely existing amid the subhuman squalor. Stranded in the wake of Katrina, the overwhelming majority of tear-stained, black faces we saw on our television screens day-in and day-out didn’t represent tourists trapped in the national calamity. They were the city’s poor with no means to escape.

Their faces, by virtue of their race, have put this disaster into very black-and-white, rich-and-poor terms.

That’s the crux of the problem of what happened in New Orleans and what can happen in any other city or town in this nation that at a moment’s notice can experience a catastrophe.

Within each of our communities are large chunks of the population whom the U.S. Census counts as living below the poverty line. Call it like it is: they’re the underclass, the men, women and children blamed for raising unemployment numbers, dragging down school test scores, serving as the breeding ground for gangs, drug dealers and every other negative stereotype in society.

The poor of New Orleans aren’t any different than the poor of any other city, but because of what happened to them, they have put a human face on what is another calamity on our country’s horizon. And it can be attributed to inequality.

A recent “Current Populations” report released by the U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S.: 2004,” told us that 37 million people lived in poverty last year. The figure was up 1.1 million from 2003.

Hispanic families recorded a decline in median income of 2.6 percent between 2002 and 2003. The number of Latinos in poverty increased from 8.6 million to 9.1 million in that 12-month period.

Another government tally, “We the People: Blacks in the United States,” reported the percentage of blacks in poverty as twice that of the total population.

What the New Orleans disaster has shown those of us who hadn’t already figured it out is that where inequality exists, those most paralyzed by it are persons of color.

This country has to reevaluate all of its towns and cities and take measures to ensure that every resident feels equally a son or daughter of the larger community, rather than a stepchild, or worse — an orphan.

At all levels, government has to do a better job of equalizing communities: providing identical high-quality public schools throughout every city, striving to guarantee the same response time and attention to crime victims, public service requests and health emergencies, the same access to health care and public transportation, opportunities across the board for new community development and jobs and access to government for all.

Poverty may never be fully eradicated, but every individual in this multiracial land deserves an equal chance to survive in life.

Mother Nature doesn’t discriminate. Why must we continue to do so?

(Marisa Treviño, of Rowlett, Texas, is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service and author of the blog LatinaLista found at http.//latinalista.blogspot.com. She may be contacted by email at mtrevino@airmail.net)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
09/11/05
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