How Things Are

Trey Smith

Staten Island is barely a dozen miles from lower Manhattan but a world away in terms of the attention it has received since superstorm Sandy hit on Monday night. Across the island, there is a pervading sense of injustice among residents, that their plight has been ignored by a city leadership and a media convulsed by the blackouts and flooded subway tunnels of lower Manhattan.

"Only Manhattan, because of rich people," says Teresa Bar, who lives in South Beach. "They only think of Manhattan, Manhattan, Manhattan."

The home Bar shares with her husband Jerzy has been severely damaged by hurricane Sandy. The storm surge ripped open both their front and garage doors, filling the ground floor with five feet of water.

The couple had evacuated when Sandy hit, but Bar is angered by what she sees as a lack of response from New York City authorities.

"Manhattan and Long Island, all the time, but we don't have any information about Staten Island at all. We pay taxes, everything, but we are the smaller people. We're not important to our government or anything."
~ from Staten Island Feels Forgotten After Being Hit Hard by Sandy by Adam Gabbatt ~

Haiti -- a very impoverished nation -- still is reeling from the earthquake that struck it in 2010. While the more well-to-do sections of New Orleans have rebounded nicely since Hurricane Katrina, the same cannot be said for the poorer sections of town. Many of those neighborhoods have not been rebuilt.

While many like to believe that all residents are treated equally after a natural or human-caused disaster, history doesn't bear this out at all. The wealthy and big business tend to get aid first, while the poor must wait around in the hopes that there is aid left to assist them.

One reason for this is that individuals, families and businesses in the higher income brackets usually are covered by private insurance and far more poor people are not. It's not that poor people don't give a wit about insurance; it's more that they can't afford it!

Another reason is that businesses, in particular, employ people and the longer businesses sit idle, the longer people are out of work. And then there is a prime reason that the rich don't like to talk about. Simply put, they have much more political clout! Anger a wealthy family and they might not contribute as much or anything to the mayor's, governor's and president's campaign war chest.

It's just how things are.