I love John Edwards. I loved him when he ran for President; I loved him when he got the VP nod. I was ecstatic that maybe, finally, after years of ignoring and whitewashing and sweeping it under the rug, John Edwards' presence in the campaign, on the national political field, meant that we, as a nation, were finally going to have a serious discussion about class in this country.
But, for whatever reason, that never really happened. I think, in some way, it's because we, as a people, are uncomfortable talking about this kind of thing. No one wants to self-identify as having less than their neighbor; no one wants to admit that such things can happen in a country like ours. So, we never really got to talk about the idea of "Two Americas" like I had hoped.
Watching the destruction in New Orleans, maybe we'll finally have to do it now...
We are literally watching John Edwards' Two Americas on CNN today.
The people left behind in New Orleans, that's the Other America. The Second America.
New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the country. It's full of people who didn't have a car, or any money, or anyplace to go if they had either of those first things, and they couldn't evacuate.
These are the people left behind, who have nothing, who can't even get basic essentials at this point. And they probably had very little to begin with.
Yet I am seeing rumblings 'round the blogworld, that these people should have evacuated, that
they bear some part of responsibility for what happened to them. If only they had run, they could have avoided this. If only they had left.
Really, what they mean to say there is: if only they hadn't been poor.
But nobody wants to say that, because, hey, this is America! We don't have poor people here! Everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and live the American dream. Poor people themselves almost always self-identify as middle-class.
We have split into a society that is Two Americas, and we don't like to talk about Other America. We don't want to talk about the conditions of life in a country that can create such a large number of people in poverty, of people with no ability to run.
Further, and probably a bit, meanspirited, but--why do I feel like if there were more pretty middle class white girls trapped down there, we wouldn't be hearing this "they deserved it, since they stayed" nonsense?
No one wants to admit that we have left a lot of very poor people to fend for themselves in near third-world conditions where they have to steal to survive, and there are murders, rapes, car-jackings, and armed gangs of men with guns on the street. They have no money and no way out.
These are not rich white men down there fighting for their very survival. We as a country ought to talk about what that means.
