VICKSBURG - It was cruel. I admit it.
Years ago, a bright intern was on the news staff of The Vicksburg Post. Like so many, she believed "poor" and "miserable" were synonyms. She also thought government had a magic wand it could wave to eradicate poverty and only needed to be convinced to wave it. Hearing all this, I sent her to interview a public housing tenant I happened to know.
He was an elderly man, had lived alone in a crumbling shack with no electricity and a wood stove for heat. He had packed in his water from a gas station about a mile away where the owners didn't mind him using the tap near their pumps.
When his shack was condemned, he was moved into an apartment in a new HUD complex. Not only did it have air conditioning, a functioning toilet, lights and a fridge - he'd been given a $15,000 check for his trouble.
She expected to find him elated.
Instead, he was miserable.
The complex was noisy, he said. Boom boxes outside his window well into the night. He couldn't have chickens. He couldn't have a garden. He was bored. He'd actually tried to flee back to his shack - and was angry to find it had been bulldozed.
The air went out of the intern's sails. I actually felt sorry for dashing her enthusiasm.
But her zeal was based on perspective a lot of people adopt. It is that everyone wants what the middle class has and can't possibly be happy or content without cars and mortgages and other things we consider basic.
When Katrina peeled back the veneer of society, we all saw, some for the first time, the "withouts" among us, mostly black and mostly in New Orleans. Their crisis was revisited in all the anniversary packages. Racism was cited as both a cause of the misery and for the lack of a speedier response. It may well have been a factor in both. Truth is, however, that since biblical times, at least, larger towns have been magnets for the impoverished. The poor can subsist in cities because they can pick up odd jobs and pocket change and then fold back into parks and alleys and ramshackle homes or basement rooms - out of sight and out of mind.
There's no claim here that this is good or right or fair or anything else: It's just the way it is.
And as hard as it may be for some to accept, poor families may be closer and their network of friends tighter. Their kids aren't in one room watching TV while the parents are in another. Not a lot of time is spent fretting about how their 401K is faring or which of those credit card notices arriving in the mail offers the better deal.
My experience is that among the poor, if one person has a job, everybody eats. If that person loses her job, somebody else will try to get one, or a benefit check, and everybody will eat again. There is a high level of generosity - probably far higher than in suburbia.
Yes, there is crime, there is desperation, there is abuse of alcohol and drugs among the destitute. Poor kids might stand on street corners selling weed and worse and stupidly spend their earnings on designer clothes and bling-bling. But it's debatable whether they are any dumber than their customers who drive away with substances to smoke or shoot or snort in their high-rises to escape from their "superior" lives.
About 80 percent of Orleans Parish residents, by most estimates, had fled before Katrina arrived. That meant the first and largely the only TV images were of the defiant, the angry, the demanding and the desperate left behind to struggle for food or water and living in the abject filth of the Superdome or the Convention Center. This is not an explanation or rationalization for any looting and preying on others that occurred, but it is delusional not to consider the entire context.
It's also a little arrogant now, a year later, to continue to assume all poverty can be chalked up to injustice or to think the American government or any government can pass a law or write a check to make it go away.
There's every good reason to keep trying, of course. No one can argue that having people who must do without life's basics in a modern nation is a good thing.
It's just that any discussion should be held in real terms. Actions should be based on a sense of what's right - not from a stance of pity. "Poor" and "miserable" are not synonyms anymore than "rich" and "happy" are. We should be honest enough to stop pretending otherwise.
