An Open Letter to Kanye West

I saw you on the hurricane fundraiser where you said that the President doesn't care about black people. I'm no Bush fan (none of them get an sensitivity points for this crisis in my book) but I must beg to differ. It's not that he doesn't care about black people, it's that he doesn't care about poor people. No politicians do. Because poverty is the problem whose solution continues to elude us (not that we've been trying that hard). It's the problem that is the soil that other problems-gangs, drugs and violence-take root in and flourish. There's very little political hay to be made solving the problem of poverty-any cure would likely cost billions of dollars and take so long to occur that no politician could profit from it. That person would likely go down in American, if not World, history but that's a lot of delayed gratification and we're not really so good at delayed gratification. The poor don't contribute money to candidates or even vote. Their only real political action is to bleed government programs dry. What good are they?

Yes Kanye, the people of New Orleans got screwed-pants-on, no-kiss screwed. They didn't just slip through the cracks they were blown through with a hurricane force fire hose. But it wasn't because they were black, it was because they were poor-too poor to influence politics in their favor, which was the screw that happened long before Katrina.