Now this is where the story gets really political: many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy are people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society. Poverty exhibits a bizarre sense of equality – the poor, white and black, are now equally suffering. Here are just a few views on this aspect of the southern situation:

• Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx wrote, “Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”
• “We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random,” said Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. “Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It’s dangerous to be poor. It’s dangerous to be black. It’s dangerous to be Latino.””Everything is God’s will,” said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. “But there’s a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things.” That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis. “Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor,” he said. “So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It’s as simple as that.”