As I watched this travesty of a recovery effort unfold last night, I was astonished that authorities at the Astrodome were actually turning away people, people who clearly had arrived from New Orleans, because they hadn't specifically come from the SuperDome.
Do you find that to be as psychotically ridiculous as I do?
I mean, why is this particular refugee more help-worthy than that one?
But then I started thinking, well, I guess what they expect those people to do is just go back to New Orleans, and then get themselves on an "approved" bus to go back to the Astrodome. Awesome idea. But then, wouldn't homeless people from all over descend on NOLA just to get on the approved busses?
And then I started thinking that these particular homeless people, the ones displaced by Katrina, are not fundamentally different than homeless people all over the country who have been displaced by other disasters, man-made and otherwise, economic policy-created and otherwise, mental health-challenged and otherwise. Why don't we have a national mission to help all those people too? And not just because of some visually-mesmorizing disaster, but just as a matter of course?
And then of course it goes beyond the borders of the US. What are we doing to alleviate the poverty and suffering of humanity the world over? What's to stop all those people from descending on New Orleans and trying to get on approved busses?
OK now I'm just rambling, sorry. What I'm after, here, I guess, is a national conversation on homelessness. John Edwards was the only one who sort of addressed this issue in the last election cycle with his "2 Americas" angle. Maybe the topic is not all that appealing to voters. But this disaster does give us an opportunity to address the question more directly, as a culture, and as a society.
If that conversation has any success to it, then maybe people will start taking seriously the idea of eradicating poverty as a means of undermining the terrorist threat as well.
All this is kind of big picture considering the awful details on the ground, I appreciate that. But when things stablilize, we might want to remember to have those conversations.