A week after the disaster, and the disaster goes on.
Tens of thousands of New Orleanians and Gulf Coast residents are living as refugees in temporary shelters - wondering where their loved ones are, imagining a future without the homes, schools, communities, jobs, and friends who were theirs a mere 10 days ago. Thousands of others fight off desperation and struggle to stay alive in what used to be their city, and is now a toxic lake with islands of rooftops and occasional dry blocks, littered with trash, ruined cars, dead bodies, and the detritus of their former lives.
The Bush Administration, having regained its senses, has redirected its focus from efforts to improve the lives of ordinary people - never its long suit - to its real expertise: creating good PR for W and acting like they're "in charge".
And as the rest of us raise and donate money, collect clothes and toys to send to the Gulf Coast, talk with our friends and coworkers and neighbors and kids, we can begin to develop answers to the question that everyone has been asking for a week:
How did it come to this? How did America become a home to this living hell?
In March of 1968, less than a month before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Memphis to sanitation workers who had been on strike for over a month. Dr. King told the parable of Dives the wealthy man, and Lazarus the beggar (Book of Luke, 16:19-31), whom Dives ignored every day as he left his home. Lazarus enters Heaven after his death, while Dives is sent to Hell:
"Dives didn't go to Hell because he was rich. His wealth was an opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus.
Dives went to Hell because he passed by Lazarus every day, but he never really saw him. Dives went to Hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to Hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived. Dives went to Hell because he maximized the minimum, and minimized the maximum. Dives finally went to Hell because he wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.
And I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."
But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."...
Dr. King went on to argue that the promises of the formal, legal rights that the Civil Rights movement had won still stood unfulfilled for poor African Americans:
"Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankest integrated restaurant when he doesn't even earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our cities, and the hotels of our highways, when we don't earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn't earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?"
Now, of course, we could add, "What does it profit a man to be able to vote for a president who advises him to flee from disaster, when he has no car to drive, no money for a motel room? What does it profit a woman to go to a refugee center when the authorities take no interest in her plight and fail to provide the center with food and medicine?"
No amount of disaster planning will prevent needless deaths and suffering if we ignore the great disaster of poverty within our country, grinding people and whole communities down day by day. The Census Bureau recently reported that 37 million of our brothers and sisters live in poverty. Until we respond to reports of that everyday disaster with the passion and anger that we feel seeing pictures of the dead strewn on the streets of New Orleans, we'll be condemning tens of thousands not only to the ordinary, everyday misery to which we've already hardened ourselves, but to the more dramatic misery of failed evacuations, overcrowded refugee centers, and degrading photo-ops by political leaders more concerned with their own poll ratings than with the suffering of the people they claim to represent.
The problem, then, is much deeper than the inefficiency of FEMA or the insincerity of the Bush Administration's determination to help. Installing competent officials in disaster-planning agencies and federal leaders who actually care about the poor will only treat the symptom, so to speak. The problem is rooted in the structures of inequality in American society, which itself is rooted in the American state religion - capitalism and profit, which America has always defended by punishing heretics with prison, legal harassment, and social ostracism.
How do we address this underlying problem? What can we do to help our brothers and sisters who are struggling with poverty and suffering through this great disaster? Having foreseen the hell that much of America has become, Dr. King foretold of what was needed to redress the injustices of our society:
"If we are going to get equality, if we are going to get adequate wages, we are going to have to struggle for it. Now, you know what, you may have to escalate the struggle a bit. If they keep refusing, and they will not recognize the union, and will not decree further check-off for the collection of dues, I'm telling you what you ought to do, and you're together here enough to do it. In a few days you ought to get together and just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.
If you let that day come, not a Negro in this city will go to any job downtown. And no Negro in domestic service will go to anybody's house, anybody's kitchen. And black students will not go to anybody's school, and black teachers, and they will hear you then. The city of Memphis will not be able to function that day. All I'm saying is you've got to put the pressure on."
But Dr. King saw the local struggle against the injustice of entrenched, racist power in Memphis as part of a larger, national struggle. So he went on to describe the next step in escalating the struggle:
"This is why we have decided that we're going to Washington. We are going to the seat of government, starting out in April. We are going around the question of jobs or income. We aren't going to Washington to beg, we are going to Washington to demand what is ours. I read in newspapers and other places questions: "Why are you going to Washington?" My only answer is that anybody who lives in America with open eyes and open mind knows that there is something wrong in this nation. I'm going to Washington to pick up my check.
You know, many years ago, America signed a huge promissory note which said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It didn't say "some men," it said "all men." It didn't say "all white men," it said "all men," which includes black men."
Dr. King was describing the project that he was building up until the moment he died, 3 weeks after this speech: the Poor People's Campaign. This campaign would broaden the movement from civil rights to economic rights, and from Jim Crow in the South to dog-eat-dog capitalism of the entire nation. He went on:
"America hasn't lived up to this. She gave the black man a bad check that's been bouncing all around. We are going to demand our check, to say to this nation, "We know that that check shouldn't have bounced because you have the resources in the federal treasury." We are going to also say, "You are even unjustly spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill a single Vietcong soldier, while you spend only fifty-three dollars a year per person for everybody categorized as poverty-stricken." Instead of spending thirty-five billion dollars every year to fight an unjust, ill-considered war in Vietnam and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, we need to put God's children on their own two feet.
I ask you to make this the beginning of the Washington movement, to go in by the thousands. And help us stand up nonviolently yet militantly. We are going to plague Congress. Documents have been written. They say what ought to be done. But nothing has been done. Nothing is ever done until you put the pressure on."
All of this, it seems to me, has been missing from American politics for a long, long time. The genuine recognition of the wasteful, needless misery of poverty. The shame of so much want surrounded by so much abundance. The awareness of the impossibility of forging justice at home while we sow injustice overseas. The articulation of the terrible moral price we all pay for living in a society where we seem either to suffer like Lazarus or walk past like Dives.
And yet, Dr. King wasn't speaking to the Dives crowd that day in March, 1968. He was speaking to the Lazaruses of America - poor, African-American garbagemen living in the South. And his call wasn't to appeal to the wealthy, or the connected, or the powerful, to change their ways and see the light. He knew, as Fredrick Douglass had said a century before, that "power concedes nothing without demand" - and that the demand needed to come from the wronged, from America's and the world's poor. His call was to those who counted for so little in our society, who until recently hadn't even had the right to vote (and today stand a fair chance of having their votes "lost" by partisan hacks overseeing our elections). Dr. King knew that despite all the pain and suffering of the poor, the poor have the power to organize, to declare their own dignity and to win their share of our society.
The most radical call Dr. King made that day was to insist that the poor had the right to rise up in defiance of a system that had abandoned and forgotten them. This is the call that I'm waiting to hear from American politics today. Not a call to send aid to our ravaged brothers and sisters, not a call to reform FEMA, or even a call to oust Bush and his cronies. But a call on the poorest of our society to stand up, stand together, and demand an end to the injustice.
Imagine the refugees in the Astrodome getting on another bus. Not to be shuttled to another domed stadium, but to come to the Mall in Washington, DC, to demand an economic and political system that shares power and shares the great wealth in our society with those who produce it. And imagine those buses joined not just by buses carrying all the refugees from Katrina, from New Orleans and San Antonio, from Mississippi and Atlanta - but also joined by buses of those who know they could be tomorrow's refugees, from Philadelphia and Chicago, from Lincoln and Gary and Charleston. Imagine all of those people going to Washington to demand an end to the everyday disaster of poverty and degradation, of greed and organized callousness in the face of suffering, of the corruption and capitulation of both major political parties, who now worship fervently at the altar of free trade, free markets, and the end to the "era of Big Government."
In upcoming debates here at Daily Kos and in upcoming elections, ask yourself whether a particular politician would fit into that march or feel threatened by it. Not just by their temperament, but by how they've spoken and what they've done.
I don't know if that march will happen in my lifetime, but if it does I will be there with my family - and I don't want to support politicians with whom I wouldn't want to march, arm in arm, demanding the transformation of our society.