HOW SHE SEES IT Katrina exposes great divide in America

By BARBARA LEE
KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has torn down the curtain and exposed the dirty secret that divides our nation like an open wound.
If anyone ever doubted that there were two Americas, Hurricane Katrina and our government's shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see.
New Orleans is a city where 67 percent of the population was black. Nearly 30 percent, one in every three people, were living below the poverty line.
Twenty-one percent of the households earned less than $10,000 a year.
Eighty-four percent of the people living in poverty in New Orleans were black.
The brutal fact is that the majority of people who died in this tragedy were poor, primarily African American. Many were old and disabled.
When the disaster came, people who had cash in the bank and a car in the garage escaped, and those who did not were shamefully left to fend for themselves.
Shocking indifference
The incompetence and indifference demonstrated by the administration in responding to this tragedy was shocking, but it wasn't surprising. Does anyone doubt that if this sort of devastation had taken place in the communities where the small percentage of people who are benefiting from the Bush administration's tax cuts live, the response would have been swift and efficient? Can you imagine these individuals, desperately clinging to their roofs, waiting for days to be rescued?
This indifference to the most vulnerable among us is not isolated to this tragedy. It is part and parcel of a systemic problem that seeks to make a large sector of our population invisible, where more than $200 billion has gone toward an unnecessary war that has stripped our resources for economic and homeland security.
Many people, viewing the human tragedy left in Katrina's wake, could not recognize the images they were seeing. They thought they were witnessing a tragedy in Somalia, Haiti or Sudan. They think to themselves, ''This does not look like the America that I know.'' Some have even come to refer to the survivors of this catastrophe as "refugees," as if the images of the survivors they are seeing are too foreign for them to recognize them as Americans.
For some of us, however, this is an America we know too well, an America that is too often swept under the rug by lawmakers and the media.
Statistics tell story
The truth is, there are almost 36 million Americans living in poverty in the United States today. There are more than 15 million living in extreme poverty.
What does that mean? According to the Census Bureau, it means that a family of three is living on less than $14,680 a year. They define extreme poverty as half of that.
The connection between poverty and race cannot be ignored. In 2003, while 8.2 percent of whites lived in poverty, the number was 22.5 percent for Latinos and 24.4 percent for African Americans.
Since President Bush took office, the number of poor people in America has grown by 17 percent. In 2002-2003 the number of children living in extreme poverty grew by half a million.
This is the real state of the so-called "ownership society." And it is unacceptable. The Bush administration's zeal for cutting taxes for the wealthy while cutting the programs that reach the most vulnerable helped lay the groundwork for this disaster.
Ideas have consequences, and the aftermath of Katrina has demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Bush administration's idea of the role of government. It was not simply the failure to respond to the hurricane in a coherent or competent manner, it was the tragic failure to acknowledge the massive structural crisis that poverty and inequality pose for our nation and the stubborn refusal to conceive of any constructive role for our government in addressing it.
It is time to start moving in the right direction again, and the first step is for the Bush administration to acknowledge that there is a problem.
I call on President Bush to demonstrate that he is not indifferent to the least among us. I have introduced legislation, asking President Bush to present his plan to eradicate poverty in this nation.
America has been shocked by the images that have exposed this terrible divide in our nation. It is up to us now to decide whether our government has a responsibility to help improve the lives of the millions of Americans who are living in poverty, or whether we will again abandon them to the dirty water to fend for themselves.
X Barbara Lee represents California's 9th Congressional District. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.