Tuesday, October 16, 2012

the last book I ever read (Twilight of the Elites, excerpt eight)



from Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher Hayes:

The problem was those left behind. As would be tragically revealed, hundreds of thousands of the city's residents did not evacuate. When the hurricane hit, as many as three hundred thousand people were holed up in their homes, or left to the deprivations of the overwhelmed Superdome. In the Katrina aftermath, some critics took this as a sign that those who had stayed behind, largely black and poor, deserved what they got or, at least, shouldn't have had quite the purchase on our sympathies that some had assumed. In 2007, Newt Gingrich, speaking at a large conservative conference, spoke of "the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where twenty-two thousand people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

There's no question that some portion of the city's residents, hardened by a lifetime of warnings that came to nil, simply chose to ride out the storm with their belongings. But many, if not most, of those who didn't evacuate stayed behind for an obvious reason: They had no way to leave. One study found that 39 percent stayed simply because they had nowhere to go and no means to get there. "Where can you go if you don't have a car?" Catina Miller, a thirty-two-year-old grocery deli worker who lived in the Ninth Ward, asked a reporter. "Not everyone can just pick up and take off." "I've only got like $80 to my name," another woman told a public radio reporter, explaining why she stayed behind. "My job and my bank and everything like that is all in New Orleans."

Mobility is something that the majority of Americans take for granted, and that's even more the case for members of the elite. A variety of social science studies show that those with money and high levels of social capital are far more mobile in the most literal sense: they have cars, are able to pay for travel, and are more able to move to pursue job opportunities. In fact this mobility confers a very significant economic advantage as it is very often the case in large metro areas that the geographic locations of desirable housing with good school districts are far from the place where there are the best job opportunities.

Meanwhile, lack of access to a car is one of the most debilitating aspects of modern poverty, particularly for those in places where public transportation is scarce and unsteady. According to the 2000 census, 8 percent of Americans resided in a household without access to a car, but that number varies widely depending on class and location. Among the poor nationwide, 20 percent live in households that don't have access to a car, and among the poor in the city of New Orleans that number was 47 percent. What's more, the city was home to hundreds of thousands with disabilities, according to the 2000 U.S. census: fully 50 percent of residents over sixty-five had some kind of disability.



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