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Wednesday, 18 October 2006 11:24 |
 | | Mark West |
The annual meeting of the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research always ends with a banquet, at which someone who has done interesting public opinion research in the last year speaks.
In the past, this person has been some political researcher whose work has gotten some buzz, or a health researcher whose findings are interesting. This year, the speaker was Susan Howell. She is the director of the University of New Orleans Survey Research Center, someone said as we left the last session of the day.
It took all this a few seconds to register on my conference-fuzzed mind as I went into the banquet hall. As the program helpfully pointed out, "The Survey Research Center regularly conducts non-partisan surveys prior to elections in New Orleans and Louisiana, as well as a Quality of Life Survey in New Orleans."
Quality of life? New Orleans? This, I thought, should be interesting.
And interesting it was. Doing research in New Orleans these days wasnët
just a matter of having trouble finding out where people lived these
days, as Dr. Howell described it. The closest analog she could describe
was that of doing research in a third-world country. Electricity was
unreliable, mail delivery was spotty, phone service was terrible.
People were living with other families, families were divided, and, in
essence, the social systems upon which survey researchers ÇƒÓ and people
in general ÇƒÓ depend were gone.
And the
population has declined precipitously. Nobody knows for sure how many
people have fled, because the city is too busy struggling to provide
basic services to try a census, and the federal government appears to
be largely indifferent. The current estimate is that New Orleans is
currently at 40 percent of its pre-Katrina population. And, if the
reports of moving companies are correct, that percentage is actually
shrinking as life continues to remain difficult.
Other data
suggests the depths to which New Orleans has been permitted to sink.
With less than half the population it once had, the suicide rate in New
Orleans has tripled, according to a recent article in the Houston
Chronicle. A Brown University sociologist estimates that the poor and
disadvantaged were disproportionately affected by the flooding, to such
an extent that the city may lose 80 percent of its African-American
population. And, as of the start of July, 13 percent of the homes in
East New Orleans had been reconnected to electricity.
"This isnët the Third World!" commentators said. "This is America!"
They were half
right. This is America. And the policies instituted during Ronald
Reaganës ǃÚnew day in Americaë have led to the rebirth of third-world
conditions, right here in the U.S. of A.
There was a
time, from the New Deal until the Reagan administration, when
Americans, like Europeans and Canadians, believed that the role of
government was to ensure a level playing field for citizens and to
ensure that there was a robust safety net for all. This all changed
with Reagan, who started union busting with his actions against PATCO,
who made the argument that all government was bad government and that
all business was good business. It was at that point that the United
States began, like some vast ship, to veer away from the fleet of
Western nations, heading rightward, abandoning the social agreements
that mark civilized nations, opening the spaces in the social fabric
into which flowed right-wing religious maniacs and kooks of every
stripe.
And, like any
third world country, we have seen the increase of the numbers of the
poor and the wealth of the rich, the decline of the middle class, a
decline in respect for common rights like habeas corpus and the rise in
the power of the big boss-man while his opponents are labels as
traitors and appeasers.
New Orleans
isnët just a part of America. Itës what happens to a great nation which
forgets the social agreement, the contract that the fortunate must help
the less fortunate.
New Orleans
isnët just a part of America. Unless we articulate a new social
contract focusing more on fair and less on laissez-faire, itës our
future.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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