No Cut-sies!

People are seeing silver linings in the Katrina disaster.

This is NOT ME saying this, this is Archbishop Paul Cordes, the Pope’s envoy bringing Vatican aid to Katrina victims: “… this event [brings with it] the hope, for many citizens, of seeing that the world is greater than the United States.” Alright! The world is Number One!

President Mugabe of Zimbabwe likewise finds hope in the disaster, in comparing his country’s circumstances to ours.

Actually, the number of people now homeless in Zimbabwe and living in squalid camps as a result of Mugabe’s interestingly named Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Trash) is on the order of the number of Americans made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. That, in a country less than one twenty-fifth the population of the US, makes the impact on Zimbabwe life of Murambatsvina equivalent to 25 Katrinas for us.

Still, after Katrina, Mugabe says his people are “very happy”, and all is well in the state of Zimbabwe, and he barred the UN homeless agency from helping his people, telling them instead to go to America and teach us Americans not to neglect ours.

By the way, Mugabe has repeatedly justified tearing down poor people’s shanties by pointing to American and European governments’ similar habit of bulldozing tent cities. If we can do it once, why can’t he do it a thousand times?

Meanwhile our own government has used the Katrina disaster to make our pre-existing homelessness vanish from the policy map. HUD has required local housing authorities everywhere to house Katrina victims in all available open housing, rather than people who were already homeless and on long frozen waiting lists, without saying “please.”

How about that? The homeless people who didn’t lose their homes to a 2005 hurricane starting with the letter K don’t count anymore! We don’t care how long you’ve been on a waiting list! What pre-existing homelessness?

Some have explained this by saying that the recently homeless Katrina victims can get on their feet faster than the “long-term” homeless, because they haven’t been homeless long enough to have become “difficult to house.” This is one of the finest crocks I have seen. It is proved to be a crock by the fact that HUD’s mandate doesn’t only apply to those homeless in the long-term, but also to people made homeless all across the country YESTERDAY, including victims of yesterday’s apartment fires.

I wouldn’t mind if we were talking about necessary triage here. If there were truly limited resources to solve homelessness than why not give priority on some arbitrary basis, like they did with the draft lottery? Instead of “all Katrina victims go to the front of the line,” how about “all homeless people born on a Saturday go to the front of the line,” or “age before beauty,” or “paper, rocks, scissors,” or “let’s make that two out of three?”

But it isn’t like that. The resources are there and they have been there for decades. No one needs to be homeless. We only have homelessness because this country has chosen to turn its back on it, for the sheer sake of esthetics.

For example, in Ocala, Florida, there were people living in a housing subdivision who offered to put up evacuees in their homes. HUD wouldn’t have to find housing for them! But when the housing association heard about it they enforced a rule against housing the homeless in the subdivision.

It would spoil the subdivision’s culture, you see. Why, next they’ll want to paint their houses purple.

Likewise the reason George Bush doesn’t want us to raise taxes to pay for either the Iraq War or hurricane cleanup boils down to esthetics: If the rich had to pay higher taxes, it would make this land a cesspit where most rich people could only afford one mansion apiece, and where their children might be forced to baby-sit to buy Nintendos.

That’s just plain ugly!