Conscious Choice Seattle: Poor Reception

October 2005 | The EM Column

Poor Reception

“Katrina forced something very jarring into the forefront of the American consciousness: This is what abject poverty in the U.S. looks like.”

By Silja J.A. Talvi

It took Hurricane Katrina to bring the real extent of U.S. poverty into our living rooms. Surprise, the same economic disparities exist in Seattle

The footage out of New Orleans transfixed and horrified me, as I know it did millions of other Americans. I sat watching the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a mounting sense of outrage and grief as it became clear the federal government’s uncoordinated and sluggish response was costing lives, minute by minute, day by day.

On live television, seasoned veterans of television broadcasting were seen breaking down in tears at the sight of dehydrated children and old people, shell-shocked and frightened families, dead bodies that had begun to rot in the open air.

These reporters soon started asking a series of questions that needed to be asked: How could so many of these people become trapped? How on earth could this be happening in the United States of America? How could the world’s richest country be witnessing a human, environmental and social tragedy of such extreme proportions?

By the second and the third day of non-stop coverage, it became very clear that nearly all of these victims had something painfully obvious in common.

They were nearly all poverty-stricken. Many of them were sick. Most of them were men, women and children of color. Many had no cars in which to escape, no money to pay for gas even if they did, nowhere near enough cash to pay for motels, or to book last-minute flights out of the danger zone. Many of them were infirm, confined to wheelchairs and beds, morbidly obese, diabetic or hooked up to oxygen machines that had stopped working.

Invisible in America

These people were among the millions of poor Americans that usually don’t make it onto network news; the invisible masses whose faces, voices and lives tend to go unrecorded and unnoticed under ordinary circumstances.

Katrina was an extraordinary situation in all possible ways and one that
forced something very jarring into the forefront of the American consciousness: This is what abject poverty in the U.S. looks like.

It shouldn’t have taken a wake-up call of this magnitude to remind us of the vast and growing economic divide in this country. What we do with this wake-up call is the bigger question. Do we wring our hands and maybe send a check or two to a relief organization (something worth doing in any event, see this month’s Evergreen Citizen space), or do we take a step further to demand that poverty becomes a front-burner issue on a local, state and federal level?

According to the latest Census Bureau data, the percentage of Americans living in poverty now stands at 12.7 percent, representing a steady four-year increase. From 2003 to 2004 alone, the number of people living in poverty increased by 1.1 million, to reach a total of 37 million.

King County is one of the regions of this country where the growing class divide is actually the most dramatic. Nearly 20 percent of our residents make do with incomes of $15,000 to $35,000, in a housing and rental market that is one of the most costly in the nation.

While the number of people earning more than $150,000 annually keeps increasing, our median income is actually dropping. And percentage of people in the county who are living in poverty is increasing dramatically–10.4 percent in 2004, up from 7.3 percent in 2003.

People living here in greater Seattle are making daily decisions about whether to spend their few dollars on housing, health care, food or transportation. For tens of thousands of people, there’s no way to have all of those things at any given time, even at the most basic levels

The CEO-worker divide

All this is happening at a time when the incomes for the richest Americans and the profit margins for large corporations have increased to proportions that we could not have envisioned even a couple of decades ago. Those corporate profits were the particular focus a study published in September by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy in September.

Among the many shocking revelations of the report is a key finding that the average ratio between CEO and worker pay now stands at 431-to-1. In real numbers, this adds up to $11.8 million in earnings per CEO compared to $27,460 for the average worker.
There’s something very, very wrong with this picture. Wouldn’t you agree?
We can’t sustain a healthy future for our community–or for our nation–if we don’t begin to re-cultivate the sense that we’re all truly in this boat together. How can we be content with watching people all around us drown–literally and metaphorically–when we have already have the wealth, the know-how and the resources to ensure a basic and good quality of life for every man, woman and child?

Everyone deserves to be safe. Everyone deserves a roof over the head, enough food to eat and a living wage. When we provide for our neighbors, we provide, by extension, for our communities and ourselves. Conversely, we ignore the well being of our neighbors at great cost to the very fabric of our society.

It shouldn’t take another natural disaster for this to hit home.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and columnist for Evergreen Monthly.

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