I was born in Louisiana and lived in Texas, so I know something about poverty in the Deep South, exactly where those two hurricanes wreaked destruction and death earlier this year.
And as a state trooper for 31 years, I learned something about responding to emergencies when peoples’ lives are at stake.
The equation is simple: Poverty + lack of preparation = disaster and death.
Poverty is not just a problem for the Deep South, the inner city or struggling farm country. There are 700,000 people living in poverty right here in Washington. And we are not immune from disasters:
* Scientists say we’re overdue for the Big One, an earthquake that would collapse major bridges;
* A tsunami would devastate our coastline and threaten the entire Puget Sound, which could act like a funnel;
* Hot mudflows from Mount Rainier have historically covered valleys with 30 feet of mud where cities stand today – Orting, Sumner, Puyallup and Kent;
* Doctors expect another global flu pandemic like the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed millions; and
* Almost every corner of Washington is vulnerable to wildfires or floods.
It’s a long list. A bit scary. But disasters, big or small, are inevitable. The decisions we make are not.
Had my family faced a hurricane like Katrina when I was a young boy in Louisiana, I have no idea how we could have escaped.
We didn’t own a car. Would we try to hike out and leave my grandmother alone? No. We would have stayed together as a family and tried to survive. The mess that happened when Houston highways turned into parking lots shows how a bad evacuation can be deadlier than the disaster itself.
Many people wondered why everyone didn’t evacuate New Orleans before the hurricane hit. It’s not a mystery. A lot of people – seniors, the poor, tourists in hotels – couldn’t just hop in their SUV, gas up and drive out.
Some stayed behind because they weren’t going to leave grandma and grandpa behind, or abandon sick family members in the local hospital. Their only choice was to ride it out and wait for help.
The hurricanes stripped the veneer from the idea that the richest country in the world doesn’t have a problem dealing with the twin problems of poverty and disasters.
Sen. John Edwards says it’s a story of two Americas: the educated elite, owning houses in good neighborhoods, then the uneducated working class, renting and struggling to survive.
To truly protect our families we need to treat the symptoms while attacking the disease. Treating the symptoms means feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and making sure the working poor have health coverage for their families.
Preparing for a disaster is also a clear job that we simply must do: getting satellite phones for local police, firefighters and hospitals because we know cell phones and land lines were useless after Katrina; making sure our local hospitals have enough beds to treat the ill or injured when a disaster strikes; and getting every family to pack emergency supplies and come up with a safe place to rendezvous.
The toughest job is attacking the disease – poverty – that can turn a disaster into a horror story. Doing that means fixing the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Imagine working full-time but making less than $20,000 a year with no health insurance or retirement. How can anyone support a family with that?
Conservative commentator David Brooks points out the gap between the haves and have-nots, the two Americas, is due to a growing education gap.
Three out of four children of the wealthiest 25 percent of families graduate from college. Children born to the working poor – the bottom 25 percent – have an 8 percent chance of getting that college degree.
The same gap exists for high school degrees. One out of three students drops out of high school; it’s not the children of the wealthy.
This education gap kills the dreams of working people who want their children to get a college degree, so they can join the middle class. It’s a wall preventing the children of middle-class families from getting a professional degree so they can have a better life.
And it’s changing our economy from a fair competition to a game rigged at birth. I believe we all must scrap and fight and push until there is one Washington, not only because poverty is a daily disaster dragging down our entire state, but because giving every person a chance at the American Dream is the right thing – the moral thing – to do.
Rep. John Lovick (D-Mill Creek) is Speaker Pro Tem of the House of Representatives.
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