This week's Speaking of Faith program is very good. It's called Seeing Poverty After Katrina (click the link to read more and listen).
It talks about how government programs aimed at helping with racism and poverty have led to a situation where the poor are hidden in neighborhoods the rest of us never see. Ex-FEMA director Michael Brown is quoted as saying of the hurricane relief effort, "We're seeing people we didn't know existed." And, of course, that's the problem more generally. We don't help the poor because we don't know them.
Friday, September 16, 2005
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When I see people's Internet postings making platitudinous pronouncements about the poor, it becomes clear to me that most of them don't know what it's like to be poor, and don't personally know poor people. They just don't get it. The whole stupidity regarding "Why didn't those people evacuate when they were told to?" Right; they'll just pile in the family Escapade with their credit cards in hand and find a Radisson on high ground. [rolling eyes]
And of course there was the time 20 years ago that "the town bag lady" (as she was called) started coming to our church regularly. The church council actually proposed giving her an assigned seat in worship so that her smell could be isolated. Jesus went to people like her, but our church runs away from them.
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