It’s always interesting when we get a hint as to what an objective, professional journalist really thinks. For example, today we discover that the Chron‘s Salatheia Bryant thinks Houstonians who are fed up with Katrina evacuees living off government assistance are a bunch of heartless yahoos:
Once they were displaced people worthy of human compassion, but our impatience with their progress has made them a dark collage of thugs, freeloaders, losers and nuisances.
Some of us, in fact, like those West Houston residents who attended a recent neighborhood meeting with Mayor Bill White, want nothing more than to have White send the evacuees home. It has become another them vs. us. They are the strange “others.”
I guess we only meant for them to be our temporary project, our feel-good domestic mission trip. But in the words of blues man B.B. King, the thrill is gone — long gone. We lost it months ago. Instead of asking how we can help, we’re singing the get-a-job-go-back-to-New Orleans-don’t-bother-us-anymore song. We no longer want to be do-gooders but evictionists.
It’s too bad that we see have come to view these Americans only as a burden. In those days under the Dome and in the months after, they showed themselves to be people who were innovative, capable of speaking up for themselves, dignified, willing to encourage each other — people in an individual and collective struggle to pick up the pieces.
Yes, they were people we were rooting for. These are things we usually applaud and appreciate, so where did we go wrong?
I propose that instead of examining them, we might regain our compassion if we examined ourselves. I know, I did. It reminded me that what I think should be easy to do isn’t always. The old adage of walking a mile in their shoes came back to haunt me. They’ve got to first have boots before they can use the bootstraps to pull themselves up.
I have a question for Ms. Bryant: How long should Houstonians help support Katrina evacuees? Five years? Ten years? Forever? Is that how we define compassion?
How would Ms. Bryant like it if she welcomed someone into her home, didn’t ask that person to pay rent or utilities, and after a year had passed, that person refused to leave, refused to take responsibility for rent and utilities, and sometimes behaved badly?
Somehow I don’t think she would examine herself to regain her lost compassion.
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