Some citizens of NO have never been out of their city

[graywarrior]

Here in Sarasota, we are beginning to see a lot of the evacuees around town. Mr. Graywarrior just called me from his job where a cop, who had been inside the Dome, came into his office with a busload of people from NO looking for services.

The cop said he saw tv for the first time 2 days ago and that the situation in the Dome and NO is worse than what we are seeing. No surprise there. He has 5 days off, then is heading back to NO.

He also said that because most of the people he was with had never been outside NO, they were completely traumatized at being moved out of their surroundings. One woman was terrified to get on the bus because she didn't know where it was going to take her.

This tragedy is going to continue and stay with this people for a lifetime.

[Az]

1. Some people have no concept how poverty affects people

Every major city has them. People that have never been outside the cities boarders. Living in that level of poverty eventually becomes day to day survival. You accept things the way they are and find what you can within that life.

[illflem]

2. I saw survey results a few years back

and while I can't remember the numbers it showed that the majority of people living on Long Island had never left the island in their life.
It doesn't happen to just the poor in New Orleans.

[Nay]

6. Nope, it sure doesn't. There are plenty of people here in VA who,

despite the fact that they have decent jobs, have never been out of the state. They are the terminally incurious, generally. Kinda like Bush, who until he became prez, never set foot outside the US.

And then there are the poor, who don't have the means to go anywhere. The isolationism and insularism that results is quite a problem in modernizing this country.

[barb162]

7. yeah, a lot of both kinds

There's a third kind , somewhat unusual, who have lots of money and just don't like spending it.

[bettyellen]

3. people better wake up that the service workers who keep every city going

are very often living at poverty level and a paycheck away from losing everything. people don't want to pay the kind of prices that would give these people a leg up.
we need a decent minimum wage and healthcare for the people that keep the cities humming. we can't hide them in the shadows anymore.

[SoCalDem]

12. In the "richest country" ever known to modern society, we need

a LIVING INCOME... The cost of doling out "almost" enough to get by, is staggering...

I read a while back that the "cost" of administering aid to a poor family is somewhere around $40K a year..Why not just GIVE the family $40K and then they would not be "poor"?

Aid administering and welfare is a cottage industry that REQUIRES a neverending supply of grinding poverty for it to exist.. Think about all the people in local/state/federal agencies, whose job it is to provide aid to the poor.. What the poor lack is MONEY..and the intervening people from where the money starts to where the money ends, are siphoning off bits and pieces of that aid.. by the time the poor people get "theirs", it's pennies on the dollar..

If there were a true safety net, there would be a lot of unemployed people in between.. It's artificially inflating employment rolls with adminsitrators/clerks/etc by the hundreds of thousands...all on the government paroll...for the 'care and feeding" of the poor..


Imagine if there was a base "income" for all who could prove citizenship.. Nationalized health care for all..a decent education for all (all that freed up $$ could go to a real educational system like we USED to have)...a fair taxation system where all EARNED (payroll) income was tax FREE up to $50K per person...and all INCOME (dividends etc INCLUDED) were taxed at 50% for people taking in over $200K, with NO deductions....

[bettyellen]

13. i think of all the people employed working to limit or deny benefits

and it breaks my heart.

[Tomee450]

4. I suspect that

many poor people of all races have never been out of their home town. There are many towns in Appalachia where the residents have been dirt poor for years and have never left the region.

[Dulcinea]

5. There are people like that everywhere.

I have some relatives who have never left the county they were born in.

[graywarrior]

8. I don't think the majority of the people who met with

Mr. Graywarrior were dirt poor....but displaced, who lost everything and had no other family members to help them,

[Lisa]

9. I can believe this ...

There was a famous geographical study many years ago, where residents of Los Angeles were asked to draw sketch maps of the areas they frequented. The lower the income, the more restricted the bounds of the "lifeworld" which they sketched.

[AnnInLa]

10. I see this all the time in the poor parish in which I reside

like N.O. the residents here are mostly low-income. They have never traveled far from home. It's not that they are non-curious, it's just that the world is brought to them via TV, so why go see the world...especially when you don't have much income to do that. Home is SECURITY, it's all they know.

This is one of the reasons "mandatory" evacuations do not work. You cannot force these people onto a bus unless it is at the point of a gun. How much time would that take? Days? Weeks? In a way, thru the media, they have seen the outside world, and they don't want to go there! I could just see authorities trying to " manditorily" evacuate these Cajuns around here. It wouldn't get done, just like it didn't get done in N.O.

[graywarrior]

11. During my drinking days years ago, I remember a bunch

of guys in a bar I hung out at planning a trip to Boston from the North Shore (about a 13 mile drive to Boston). Well, they talked about it for weeks, planning on what they were going to pack and carry on the bus and the train. What kind of food they'd bring, where they stach their liquor, etc.

They never went. They could not apply their imaginative plans to the act of going.

They then spent months talking about how they all made plans to go to Boston.