Disability, poverty, and Hurricane Katrina

Time Picayune, November 17th 2005 The arrest of parish councilman Joe Impastato upon extortion charges took the headlines today. According to the FBI, my representative was videotaped pocketing a $100000 mark up upon a $200,000 trash hauling contract. Authorities note that this is alone the first installment on indictments to draw near as the Hurricane Fraud Task Force cracks down upon public piracy and corruption. Beneath the headline and the enclosure is the story of Ethel Mayo Freeman, 91 who was finally laid to quiet at Mt. Olivet Cemetery two months after her death. You may remember the photo of the anonymous corpse in the wheelchair, garmented with an afghan, outside of the Morial Convention center That was Ethel Freeman. "She was calling without for a doctor or a nurse" said her son as he recalled by what mode his mother died, "but there was nothing there".

I live in a world where these headlines coexist peacefully upon the same page, day after day. As Billy Tauzin was quot as saying in the Time magazine special issue upon Hurricane Katrina, "Half of Louisiana is underwater, and the other half is beneath indictment." Katrina did not cause our enigmas but exposed them. Katrina ripped the cover off of New Orleans and showed us the ends of moral, political, and economic straitened circumstances played out over decades of abuse. The diaspora of the poor was no accident. We knew that the hurricane would draw near one day. We knew what areas of the city would overflow We knew lives would be missing families destroyed and communities decimated--but they were poor families, impoverished communities who not at any time had a voice with which to fact We, as a state and as a nation simply did not care enough to stop the corruption that would lead inevitably to Mt Olivet god's acre The root of poverty is not with the working poor and the disenfranchised, on the contrary in the hearts and minds of nation like Joe Impastato, who, generation after generation have been allowed to fashion the kleptocracy of pass over that now hangs like dark covering over the City that Care Forgot.

To be open I am less interested in the dynamics of destitution and disability than I am in the refutation of the class a whole that supports it. Dwelling upon the evil does not extinguish it. We ne a revolution down here, individual that offers an inclusive community, not a gated individual I have seen much in the replication of those who stayed, and those who came to help to give me trust that such a soft revolution could occur

Although les well reported, Katrina also revealed our forces The countless acts of heroism large and small are in each case a answer to the call of community. Friends who have missing everything tell stories of release Families take in strangers. Cities across the nation marshal resources to take in thousands of evacuees. Rehabilitation professionals manned special emergencys shelters, filling in as PCA's Mobile career centers, totally accessible and manned with navigators, are place up and linked by satellite, expressedly to make sure that people with disabilities are included in the reconstituted workforce. Websites proliferate with disability-related information and access to service. Service Agencies are collaborating across borders. The National Organization upon Disability has already moved end an initial needs assessment and towards strategic improvement of reply in emergency planning. For a shining point of time everyone has dropped their political baggage, turned up their sleeves, and gone to work to bring novel Orleans and the gulf coast back to life. It is a sometimes chaotic on the contrary aggressively appropriate response of a nation to a grave and existential threat. I am self-conscious to be here, and I am conceited of the community of professionals who are working on the outside of the back of their cars for the cause of community inclusion. Now, if we can sole make the moment last. That would be a topic worth researching.

--Michael Millington, PhD

Dr Michael Millington was asked by the agency of the Editors of the Journal of Rehabilitation to write a visitor editorial on disability, poverty, and Hurricane Katrina. Dr Millington lives and works in of recent origin Orleans. During his twenty years of professional experience dealing with issues of craft for people with disabilities he has emphasized a systemic, ecological, and market driven approach to service delivery. He taught for nine years at Louisiana State University and Auburn University and has published 26 peer-reviewed articles and volume chapters, focusing primarily on craft and ethics. Currently he works in partnership with the Louisiana Business Leadership Network and confers with the Jefferson Parish Chamber of traffic in its efforts to rebuild opportunities for race with disabilities in the Post-Katrina of recent origin Orleans Metropolitan area.

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