Time to examine inequality

It is enormously difficult to write about what suddenly seem trivial

matters when our house and hearts are filled with those dreadful

images from New Orleans.

I watch the agony there and hear the anger of the victims and the

o7mea culpasf7 of the people who could have prevented much of this

and who should have responded -- and didn’t -- at a level the tragedy

demanded when it happened, and I find myself thinking back over

similar national tragedies in this country in my lifetime.

And the one that comes most to mind is the Great Depression of the

1930s.

Although the Depression was triggered by the stock market crash of

1929, it took many months for the dimensions of the tragedy to

manifest themselves -- unlike Hurricane Katrina, which struck in a

few hours and left devastation almost immediately behind. But we will

be discovering in the weeks and months ahead the full dimensions of

the Katrina tragedy, and it occurs to me that some of the lessons of

the Great Depression could be instructive in that dismal process.

I was 10 when my father lost his retail business and finally our

home in a few months of inability to meet call loans that destroyed

both his spirit and his business. He never fully regained either one,

although he finally settled into a sales job in a department store

that provided a modest livelihood.

In the 10 years before the beginning of World War II marked the

end of the Depression, I watched this country -- like my parents --

deal with hunger and joblessness and despair frontally and with

determination and compassion that carried us through the war years

that followed.

Admittedly, I viewed -- and now recall -- these events from the

perspective of a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) kid raised in a

heartland Midwestern city. The social problems that were very much

present in this country and would surface in violence in the years

following the war were mostly out of my view. And to some extent,

they were out of the nation’s view too because the Depression -- like

Katrina -- didn’t choose its victims. We were pretty much all in it

together.

I read about the looting and violence and racial anger in New

Orleans, and I have quite different recollections of the 1930s.

I remember the dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of embarrassed knocks

at our back door and the transients who stood there asking for food

and offering to work in payment. My mother always fed them, and there

was never any distinguishing of skin color.

I remember the forlorn piles of furniture on the street of people

whose homes had been foreclosed and had no place to go. And the long

bread lines, bending around blocks, quiet, orderly, despairing, a

random mix of folks, all with a desperate need to feed their families

that brought them together far more than the division of skin color

might have separated them.

I remember neighborhood grocers who risked failure to run up long

lines of credit for good customers who paid whatever they could, when

they could, in the constant hope of finding a job -- or another that

paid a living wage. And I remember a friend and neighbor who was

about to lose his house and took out a life insurance policy, then

hung himself so his family could pay off their mortgage and have a

place to live.

I remember the primary means of transportation for those of us who

couldn’t afford to buy tickets was hitch-hiking. I got around the

United States almost exclusively that way, right up to the time I

enlisted in the Navy. Hitch-hiking characterized that period for me.

It required a good deal of trust in fellow humans, both in the person

seeking the ride and the drivers who picked them up. And it was done

in the spirit of those times: that in the final analysis, we’re all

in this together.

And, finally, there was the role of government in our lives.

The stock market crash and its aftermath came at a time when the

people running our government believed firmly that it should

concentrate on aid to business rather than public works and relief

for the growing army of unemployed. President Hoover said in 1931

that he wanted “to solve great problems outside of government

action.”

Small wonder, then, that Franklin Roosevelt came into our lives

almost as a saint. He provided instant visible leadership, then

turned the power of the government into dozens of creative measures

to address the agony and poverty and despair of the Great Depression.

We had hope once again. And we had social programs that have

served us well for half a century, some of them now under attack.

So how does this speak to the tragedy of New Orleans?

First and foremost, it stresses the role of government in

providing leadership and action. The psychological impact of the

president wading through the flooded streets of New Orleans the day

after the storm hit to assure victims that help was on the way could

have calmed the anger and signaled his sense of urgency in getting

immediate federal help to the scene. Far as I know, nobody from

Washington got their feet wet for four days -- if ever.

Second, this is no time to debate the role of the federal

government in our lives. It’s a time for action, for creative

programs to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of

dislocated people. The president could lead the way by throwing open

the gates of his Texas ranch to a busload of New Orleans refugees.

And third, the near absence of white faces in those montages of

suffering people enduring the Superdome and the New Orleans

convention center speaks loudly to our most lacerating domestic

problem: the growing gap between the haves and have-nots in our

society. Both literally and symbolically, most of the white folk were

able to get out of New Orleans ahead of the carnage, and most of the

black folk weren’t.

In the Depression years, most of us were in the same boat, working

to the same ends, helping one another. That isn’t true today -- in

Newport-Mesa or in the United States -- and it needs to be addressed.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.