The Larger Shame
By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOF, OP-ED COLUMNIST
From the NYTimes on
the Web, September 6, 2005
The wretchedness coming across our
television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay
with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
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Nicholas
D. Kristof, NYT
Pnoto |
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It has also underscored the Bush
administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest
Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw
after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 -- except that
Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most
vulnerable citizens.
But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing
number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And
while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of
the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that
America's poverty is worsening on his watch.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again
last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year
earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor
people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even
more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as
high as in China's capital. That's right -- the number of babies who died
before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002
in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American
baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born
in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.
Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time
since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality,
according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of
Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.
So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones
because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent
of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and
many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S.
ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.
One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the
looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan,
killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior.
Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him
whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.
"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese.
They were foreigners."
The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that
Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social
fabric. In contrast, the U.S. -- particularly under the Bush
administration -- has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by
redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.
It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New
Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than
vaccinations for children.
None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty.
As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won."
But we don't need to be that pessimistic -- in the late 1990's, we made real
headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books
ever written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason
DeParle.
So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious
national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country.
And in our shock and guilt, that may be politically feasible. Rich Lowry
of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion:
"a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock
births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban
spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.
Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77
babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty.
That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.
E-mail:
nicholas@nytimes.com
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