The people who stepped off the buses were not the ones I had seen on TV. They were poor, certainly, and uneducated but not dumb. Many were elderly, while others were handicapped and mentally ill, not having had medication for days. Most of the ones who could work had jobs, and most of the absent fathers were a result of being carried away by the surf. They all had stories to tell of the horrors they experienced at the Superdome. One white man said, through his few remaining yellow teeth, that he and his wife had experienced fifteen blissful years of marriage, and this was the first bad thing that had ever happened to them.

Some evacuees offered to help, saying, "You're here to help us, so we'll help you." A friend recounted an instance where a family gave up the chance to be on TV to find their missing relatives because they "had only been here two days", whereas another couple had been stranded for five.

These were people from the neighborhoods white people insist will result in your death if you step inside their borders, but I can honestly say, I would have no qualms about inviting any of them into my house.  In a situation like this, all those distinctions of class and race and education slip away. The volunteers were poor people and college students and five hundred dollar an hour lawyers who were picking up trash. Some were rich society wives who were talking about the flood over braised lamb shanks in expensive restaurants when they suddenly found themselves unable eat another bite until the evacuees had been fed. Many of the National Guardsmen had been to Afghanistan and Iraq, and found this to be far more disorganized. They were cool and disciplined, showing me that we are being well represented over there.

Everything was ugly and beautiful at the same time. I count the experience, as horrible as it was, as one of the high points of my life. The only indication that the experience might have been in any way traumatic came later, in watching the news accounts, the way certain segments of our population have been painting these people I had seen. 

When someone would suggest that these people stayed behind by choice, that they were in some way deserving of what they had undergone, my hear pounds.  I have not cried since I was ten, but my eyes start to tear. I have been frustrated by the news before, but this was something different, a kind of rage and frustration that can’t be contained. 

When my Republican friends explain that they wouldn't give money to "looters", or I read about the towns in Louisiana who turned the evacuees away because they didn't want to be the victim of riots, I can feel nothing but spite for how sensationalist news can lead to such misery. Why didn’t they walk? CNN asked. Yes, why didn’t these people walk to flee a storm moving faster than the speed limit, with an eye two marathons wide so that they could face a hundred-and-fifty mile winds on the open road? 

The worst story, the one that still gives me nightmares, is the one about the boy who was arrested for stealing a bus that brought dozens of people to safety. It brought flashbacks of a renegade bus that arrived while I was there. I had met those people. The driver could have stolen a Ferrari. He didn’t have to take anyone with him, yet he had. Why had he driven to the Astrodome if he had no intention of handing it over? When I read that, all the goodwill and faith I gained that night is transformed into hatred and disillusionment, my optimism turns into despair.

Always these stories have a specific purpose: to shut down empathy so that we won't demand action or accountability. They are told because we are a charitable nation, and if these people aren't rapists and murders and looters, then what they are is suffering, and suffering would demand attention that wasn't given. The fact that it wasn't given would demand that someone be taken to task.

When Barbara Bush -- who's home town stands to gain billions from the disaster - frets about how these people might want to stay, the same situation that brought out the best in us becomes a catalyst for the worst. The moment we came together becomes another reason to divide.

I think of the black man who said his distrust of white people disappeared after being welcomed by our city with open arms, and of the gratitude on the faces of the people who had found themselves among volunteers who did not cast them away, as so many others clearly had.

The ugly and the beautiful. The beautiful came unwashed and packed on stolen buses. The ugly wears suits in front of TV cameras as they spread interested parties’ viciousness in exchange for access. They lounge by the pool of their River Oaks mansions, sealing government contracts to rebuild New Orleans as they worry about protecting their neighborhood’s white tint.

I no longer know if I’m an optimist or a pessimist.  I come away from this whole experience knowing only one thing for sure: this nation is rotting from the head. Our nation is suffering because of the incompetence of elected officials, our millionaire talking heads and clueless military planners.

Our nation’s hope lies at the bottom, with our National Guardsmen, our volunteers, and disaster relief teams tasked with cleaning up the consequences of the elite’s greed and negligence. It lies with the people who, God willing, still don’t have access to TVs, and have not yet realized the humanity they experienced is not shared by all.