Margaret Thatcher’s Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit commented in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots: I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found i…

I have lived through it before. There is nothing like leaving your house at 7 in the morning to go to work and looking next door at a bunch of thugs still drinking from the night before and wondering if you are going to have any belongings when you come home from work. Wait – Yes there is – Having the same people yell at you for mowing your yard at the unbelievably early hour of 10 in the morning on Sunday.

Thanks to our wonderful government and section 8 housing, my old neighborhood turned from a mixed working class neighborhood to boys in the hood.

You are absolutely correct in that that most of the 24% of black people who are poor are working poor. This includes New Orleans. Many (if not most) are single family homes, but most of those single parents do work.

“Easy Street! If I could live on Easy Street, Nobody works on Easy Street. Just sit around all day!

Life is sweet, for folks who live on Easy Street. No weekly payments you must meet that make your hair turn gray.

When opportunity comes knocking, you just keep on with your rocking, ‘Cos you know that your fortunes made, And any time that you desire, there’s a man that you can hire….To plant trees so you can have some shade!

Oh Easy Street, I’m telling every one I meet ….If I could live on Easy Street. I wouldn’t want no job today, So please go away!”

—-Words and music written by Alan Rankin Jones and recorded by Louis Armstrong and Sarah Vaughan

One major complaint about FEMA was that they were not moving many house trailers to New Orleans because there was a rule against putting them up in flood zones.

The real truth is that most property owners don’t want a FEMA village in their backyard.

Certainly, some communities are attracted to this because there is a lot of Federal money to be had. But then the truth becomes obvious – the FEMA money is not forever. When the FEMA money runs out, the community is left with the FEMA village, and many people who don’t work.

Now, as a posture, FEMA is moving the trailers to some trailer parks. You can bet that these trailers will not be in the Governor’s, the Senators’, or the Mayor’s back yard.

Why give that up?

What doesn’t get told is the violence I see every day on my high school campus where I work that has gone up exponentially because of the actions of high-school aged Katrina evacuees who have no interest in getting to class on time and doing their school work.

One other item. The concept of living wage is a joke. You can make it on a low paying job IF you are willing to be resourceful enough and sacrifice until you have the opportunity to 1)further educate yourself 2)work hard enough to earn a raise 3)take a risk to improve your lot. I know of and see plenty of these stories daily. The key is that not everyone is willing to do it.