"Trouble the Water"

Watched this documentary on Netflix a couple of nights ago. I won't say a lot about it because it just makes me too angry when I discuss the disparity between how the rich and the poor are treated in our country. While I found the treatment of the poor horribly wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I was still surprised while watching this documentary.to what lengths government agencies appeared to have intentionally forgotten them!

Toward the end of the movie, the female in the couple it follows throughout says something very profound. A few weeks after Katrina, she and her husband head to Memphis to live with extended family, but they later return to New Orleans because he never graduated from high school so he can't get the big paying jobs in Memphis that you need to be educated for...the jobs that "pay $10 an hour". (That's right, that's about $20,800 a year!) And Kim (his wife) makes the observation that she's glad they went to Memphis, it showed them how people in different places do things...that they (the people in Memphis) are preparing themselves to be educated, or just find a way to improve their lives. Kim adds, 'I don't know, down here it's like they're preparing us for prison or something.'

And we who sit comfortable in our suburban homes with plenty of food, opportunities for education and the ability to achieve whatever we set our minds to, wonder why "they" don't just take the opportunity to improve their lives and break the cycle of poverty. Maybe because their whole lives they never knew there was a whole other world out there where people are actually encouraged to improve themselves. Maybe they just need someone to believe that they can be more than just another drug-related statistic or welfare recipient. Maybe I'd better stop before this becomes a full-blown rant against how we ignore poverty.

But DO watch this documentary and ask yourself how much faith and trust you put in government agencies taking care of you in times of trouble. These people that we call "poor", shame me in how they opened up their home and their lives to total strangers, offered them their last scraps of food, rescued them from flooding and transported them to safety when the government agencies weren't coming to rescue them. I pray if widespread devastation ever comes to us that we will be willing to do the same!