Katrina: A New Untouchable Class

Jaron Lanier
Sun Sep 4, 1:08 AM ET

Will the Katrina refugee populations building up in Houston and elsewhere become a new untouchable class? Will the experiences of these people be integrated into the national dialog or will we distance ourselves from them?

My fear is that we'll lose them as members of the American family. We'll be embarrassed by our own failings and pretend not to see them. They, on the other hand, will find it hard to regain any trust they might have had before in the American social contract.

We have no idea what it will be like to suddenly have in our midst hundreds of thousands of traumatized fellow citizens who have not just "lost everything" as could be said of victims of other natural disasters, but who have lived through a hellish failure of civilization. This is something that has not occurred within the USA in generations on anything like this scale. There will be thousands of personal stories of hunger, fear, and filth. There will be so many stories of abandoned hospital patients, raped children, mobs, and corpses, that we will package them into mental summaries, unable to keep a single story in clear focus. <snip>

What I'm most curious about is whether the hundreds of thousands of refugees will cause any change of course in the drift of the dynamic social contract in America. When exactly will all those people in places like the Astrodome leave and under what circumstances? Will they be bussed off to some newly constructed housing project back in New Orleans in a few years? Somehow it's hard to imagine that. Who will pay for those projects? Will they just be asked politely to walk out on the street with new clothes and a few dollars? All of them at once? <snip>

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20050904/cm_huffpost/006761