Poverty

When the poverty rankings of cites came out earlier this week, I was trying to find the time to come up with post regarding the "war on poverty" and how it's done nothing to our country but rip away the soul of our inner city populations.

On the anniversary of Katrina, I will always be struck by the people just hanging out waiting and waiting and waiting for someone to save them. I will always be amazed at the total poverty of soul and imagination that I saw from the people down there in the hurricane's aftermath.

But as I was blog surfing this morning, I ran across this post by Scott Ott at Scrappleface. As you know, Scott's blog is 99% satire and good satire at that.

But he wrote a post to the editor of a San Francisco city newspaper after last year's Katrina anniversary and was critical of Scott's satire. He absolutely crushes it with his response.

Here's some powerful excerpts.

The danger of centralized government control is not that it robs a few dollars from rich people and gives them to the poor. It’s not even that such a bureaucratic behemoth spawns the waste of billions of dollars. After all, it’s just money.

No, the threat of this system is that it strips a man of what makes him a man, and turns him away from his inner resources, or the inclination to partner with neighbors to solve problems. It humiliates him, blinds him and ultimately cripples him.

And then this

Journalists, by habit, prefer stories they can receive from the tip of a spoon held by an “expert” or official. They, too, have turned to big government and have become dependent upon her for their sustenance. What most Americans know of the situation in the hurricane zone is only what TV or other news sources tell them. Most of that information comes from “authorities” in the government. The reporters have told us that the real story is all about the government’s response. They have largely ignored the responsible activities of thousands of unseen hands restoring towns, parks, homes and lives.

Success stories are buried. Tragedy is blared from the housetops. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that further deepens dependence upon the government, and further strips the dignity of the person.

The victims of Katrina are not really the victims of Katrina herself. The tragedy began long before the hurricane hit.

Natural disasters have always happened and always will. While, mercifully, they don’t occur every day in every place, they are common enough that we ought to have an expectation that bad things can and will happen. We need to cultivate the inner resources in ourselves, our children and our neighborhoods to cope with the inevitable. When we cede that power and responsibility to the federal government, we surrender a part of what makes us human and leave ourselves more vulnerable to the tempest.

Whether you believe in God or not, you have surely experienced how the human soul sings when we gather in chorus to accomplish a great purpose in the midst of tragedy. It’s as if we were designed to work together with our family, friends and neighbors. There is a blessing in it that exceeds the penalty of the curse.

Our state-run schools and spoon-fed media have conditioned us to look to government. They’ve also trained us to take offense at any expression of love that doesn’t result in government intervention and redistribution of taxpayer dollars. ‘Compassion’ has been redefined as ‘entitlement’ and thus stripped of its power and utility.

The devastating impact of this mindset is the apparent withering of the individual spirit and of community cooperation which have been the hallmarks of this great nation.

When my own community was hit by flooding some years ago, people stepped off their porches, shouldered sandbags, delivered meals, took in the homeless, wielded shovels against the muck, and generally helped each other in the task of restoration. As awful as that flood was, I will always remember it fondly, not for the harm it did to us and to our property, but for the good it did in us and in our community.

And concluding

We don’t have time to blame anyone for our misfortunes. We’re too busy working to overcome them. We don’t have faith in some distant bureaucrat, rather we turn to the resources that God has placed near at hand. We lean on our brothers. Many of us call on our Father in our time of need, and He sends our neighbors who love us more than we love ourselves. Later, we will turn to our helpers when they need us and repay the debt, only to learn that no debt existed because acts of compassion shower blessings on giver and receiver alike.

Amen Brother