The meaning of compassion

Apparently, Houston wants Katrina evacuees to move on because they have “changed” the city. Schools are overcrowded, the crime rate is up, and everything bad is blamed on “those people from News Orleans.” I am not outraged because I understand that there always come a time when one is tired to “give” and when one feel that one can no longer be hospitable especially when you believe that the people that you welcome are ruining your city. Yet, something about this is troubling because it means that compassion is conditional and that some people don’t deserve compassion. My question is where does Houston want those Americans to go? They have no place else to go. Maybe the best thing to do is for elected officials of  Houston and of Texas to pressure the federal government to do more to rebuild New Orleans. But still, I have this sick feeling in my stomach that the compassion fatigue that there is in Houston has more to do with the fact that the evacuees are not the right kind of people because they are too poor and because the idea that one is poor because of his/her personal traits is still popular in America.

Comments

[Benjamin]

Apparently the city of Houston wants the Evacuees of New Orleans
to move on because the city really didn't want the CITIZENS of New Orleans to be here in the first place. Obviously the city was more interested in the Federal Dollars that came with the evacuees more than the evacuees themselves and now that most of those dollars have arrived......it's time for the evacuees to go. The city of Houston seems to blame their crowded schools, crime, and other domestic issues on Katrina evacuees because none of these problems existed in this GREAT city prior to Hurricane Katrina. The city of Houston was never known for the amount of drugs that flow through the city and onto the rest of the country prior to Hurricane Katrina. Houston was never known for its corrupt public officials and political scandals prior to Hurricane Katrina; just ask Enron, Halliburton, and Tom DeLay. No, of course not! It has to be the Katrina Evacuees that have brought this trouble to this wonderful city who has run out of compassion that they didn't have in the first place.

[heatherbee]

I really appreciated this comment:

"...the idea that one is poor because of his/her personal traits is still popular in America."

I am a middle-class American and though I like to think of myself as liberal, it had never seriously occurred to me to question this assumption, which I suppose was taught to me unconsciously from a young age.

Well spoken.