Blaming the displaced

[Will be light bloggin from Chris this week while he's on vacation.]
Today's Mississippi Sun-Herald has a disturbing, although probably typical, story about about how cities are handling the Katrina refugees in their communities. The majority of those displaced by the storms 10 months ago haven't returned, which means they are still trying to make a living and a life, often from scratch.

News reports focus on lurid tales of waste and fraud, "billions" of taxpayer money squandered for our modern-day equivalent of Reagan's "welfare queens" -- the undeserving poor.

In reality, the government's support for those displaced by Katrina has been stingy and uncoordinated. Refugees from the Gulf were largely forced to fend for themselves, relying on a patchwork network of church groups and non-profit agencies to help them navigate services for housing, schools, jobs, and other necessities of life. Only a couple cities appointed "case managers" who could help Katrina victims coordinate help from different sources. Starting in 2006, most evacuees were kept in a constant state of limbo about whether their housing assistance would end, making long-term planning difficult.

And all along, Congress and the White House dragged their feet in rebuilding the Gulf, the real solution to solving the Katrina evacuee problem.

But in our conservative political climate, it's much easier to blame the victims, which is what makes stories like the Sun-Herald piece possible:

HOUSTON - In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, Katrina evacuee Samuel Smith sits on a donated futon and watches a borrowed television in a subsidized apartment the Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided for six months. The unemployed truck driver just started looking for work.

That would infuriate U.S. Rep. John Culberson, a Houston Republican who wants what he calls "deadbeat" evacuees from New Orleans out of his city.

"Time has long since passed for the able-bodied people from Louisiana to either find a job, return to somewhere in Louisiana or become Houstonians," said Culberson, whose district neighbors the city's southwest pocket where many of 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees settled in Houston.

"You have to make an effort not to have a job in Houston," he said.

Either that, or you have to have suffered severe post-traumatic stress from a hurricane, be facing a chaotic and short-staffed social services system, be struggling to figure out whether political leaders are committed to rebuilding your home city, or other issues. But far easier to beat up on those struggling, right? Read the rest of the story, and you can see where the Katrina debate is heading.