Over the last week, we’ve seen some stunning remarks in response to Hurricane Katrina, not the least of which includes the president’s claim, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” But for sheer callousness, consider Linda Chavez’s twisted observation.
In New Orleans, “you are dealing with the permanently poor — people who don’t have jobs, are not used to getting up and organizing themselves and getting things done and for whom sitting and waiting is a way of life,” says Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
“This is a natural disaster that is exacerbated by the problems of the underclass. The chief cause of poverty today among blacks is no longer racism. It is the breakdown of the traditional family.”
I’ve seen several conservatives engage in blame-the-victim attacks, but Chavez’s comments are over the top, even for her. The real problem, as she sees it, is that the thousands of poverty-stricken Americans who were stuck in New Orleans in nightmarish conditions are accustomed to “sitting and waiting” as “a way of life”? Is she serious?
Thankfully, only a few pages away from where Chavez’s quote ran in the Washington Post, there was another article highlighting just how wrong Chavez is. Those trapped families weren’t victims because of the “breakdown of the traditional family”; they were stuck because they live paycheck-to-paycheck, couldn’t afford transportation out of the city, and couldn’t afford to pay for accommodations, even if they did evacuate.
These men and women don’t sit and wait — they work hard, play by the rules, and get left behind thanks to the policies espoused by Chavez and people like her.
The Post, for example, profiled the Dunbar family in New Orleans.
“Me and my wife, we were living paycheck to paycheck, like most everybody else in New Orleans,” Eric Dunbar, 54, said Saturday.
He was standing on wobbly, thin legs in the bowels of the semi-darkened Louis Armstrong Airport, where he had been delivered with many others after having been plucked by rescuers from a roadway.
He offered a mini-tutorial in the economic reality of his life.
“I don’t own a car. Me and my wife, we travel by bus, public transportation. The most money I ever have on me is $400. And that goes to pay the rent. And that $400 is between me and my wife.” Her name is Dorth Dunbar; she was trying to get some rest after days of peril.
Dunbar estimated his annual income to be about $20,000, which comes from doing graphic design work when he can get it. Before the storm, when he and his wife estimated how much money they needed to flee the city, he was saddened by the reality that he could not come up with anywhere near the several thousand dollars he might need for a rental car and airfare.
“Sitting and waiting is a way of life”? I don’t think so.
Remember, Chavez was Bush’s first choice to Secretary of Labor, looking out for the interests of working people nationwide. That didn’t quite work out for her — Chavez failed tell the Bush team about housing a Guatemalan woman whom she hired illegally to clean her house, and then encouraged a neighbor not to talk about the cleaning woman to the FBI when agents asked questions during her background check — but the fact that president chose Chavez in the first place speaks volumes about the values of the Bush White House.