A little rant I wrote yesterday. I wasn’t going to post it, but since it isn’t going away, I’m biting the bullet and posting it. Please skip if you are not rant-inclined.

Rich people have it better than poor people. This is pretty much a universal phenomenon, short of sudden proletarian revolution. Money buys you comfort, security, health care, transportation…money buys you a lot of splendid things, which is why we, as a species, want it. When bad things happen, poor people, unshielded by big yielding cushions of money, often get the worst of it. They live in low-quality housing which collapses in an earthquake; or are packed closer together and are killed in fires; or live closer to the docks where the plague rats come in; or have bad sewer systems which facilitate the spread of disease. They have less power, so less attention is paid to them. They have more problems, and those in power have less reason to address those problems.

It’s always been like this. It’s squalid and horrible and unjust and heart-wrenching, and we as a society and as a species should try to change it. That doesn’t make it less true. When something goes wrong, the people who get forgotten, or underserved, or just generally the short end of the stick, are usually the poor. That doesn’t mean that any stupidity, poor planning, or negligence which hurts these people is deliberate.

The response to Hurricane Katrina is simply not a gigantic conspiracy by the nebulously defined bad old dudes in the government to ‘get rid of poor people in New Orleans’. The save-yourself evacuation plan favored those with cars, so more poor people were stuck. It doesn’t mean they deliberately left the poor to die in the hurricane. The makeshift shelter of the Superdome is ill-equipped for the purpose — so poor people are suffering. That doesn’t mean that “they weren’t expecting them to actually survive” (actual quote from message board) in the Superdome.

The internet seems to think it was a chap named Nick Diamos who said “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” He was right. Stop trying to understand the bad things that happen to innocent people by creating phantom conspiracies. Watch the <a href=”http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do” target=”links”>Penn & Teller: Bullshit! about <a href=”http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=ct” target=”links”>conspiracy theories. By all means, give to the <a href=”http://www.redcross.org/” target=”links”>Red Cross or do something to help. Try to help the ongoing problem of poverty in America. But please, stop attributing the suffering of the poor to big nameless evil so that you can have someone to hate, someone to blame. It doesn’t help, because this isn’t evil; it’s careless, slapdash, selfish and frightened…and very, very human.