that garbage in our backyard

People are so shocked, appalled, surprised by the looting, raping, killing that went on in and around the Superdome.

Do people in this country not realize this is a daily reality for the people we hide in our projects?

We sit in our Pottery Barn leather chair, sipping Starbucks with that college degree certificate on the wall -- that education at least partly paid for by our parents. We shake our heads, look down our noses at them saying "well they deserve to live in poverty if they're too lazy to WORK for a living. We EARNED what we have here."

I dunno about you, but I didn't EARN the priviledge of being born a white woman to a man with masters degrees in Engineering & Physics from a top university. I didn't EARN the priviledge of growing up in a cute pretty home in an upper middle-class neighborhood host to good elementary and high schools with state champion programs. These were all things that were handed to me by devine luck. And all these things held my hand through my development and are 90% responsible, in my opinion, for any success I've enjoyed in life.

From what I heard growing up, projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes (Chicago) were nearly like prison/war zones 24/7. I remember taking the Halsted bus to ballet class every morning from my hipster Lakeview 3 flat past Cabrini Green. As the bus cruised between North and Division, all of us would hunker down so we wouldn't be exposed in the windows should any gunfire fly from the projects.

Now imagine being 7 years old, about 50 pounds, about 3 feet tall. And to go to school, you have to walk past drug dealers and gangs firing the same guns we feared on that Halsted bus. Would you go to school every day if doing so meant you may lose your life? What if you're a young boy being raised by a single mom and you know, by leaving her home alone, she's vulnerable to that rapist down the hall and the locks on the door haven't been sturdy for years.

I remember skipping school for a week becuase I no longer could withstand the teasing from my classmates. If they were 100 pounds heavier with guns and knives....well....

So we here in the US have shoved what we don't want to see in the dark alleys, dirty and dangerous buildings grouped together out of the way so we don't have to be reminded of them and our failure as a society to help them.

Kinda like the crap you put behind your garage because you don't want to look at it, yet for some reason you know you can't destroy it?

Putting it behind the garage doesn't improve the conditions of the undesirables.

It doesn't make it go away.

It just sits there getting more decrepit.

Am I the only one who sees all Katrina did was destroy the garage so we're forced to see what we've been hiding behind it for decades?