Weeks later, the horrific scenes from New Orleans on TV are still seared in our frontal cortexes --- like some sad melody you can't get out of your head:

--- A black family on their apartment's roof, staring up blankly like terrified deer caught in headlights.

---The huddled mass of blacks, ringing the Superdome, packed so tight nobody can move.

---A screaming black mother, begging for help for her babies and cursing government officials who haven't come to their rescue.

---Black young men walking out of a corner convenience store, their arms loaded with half-gallon cartons of milk, Pampers and six packs.

---And, most numbing, black bodies floating face down in filthy water.

These images of the left-behind poorest of the poor, stranded around the Big Easy's exposed urban underbelly, made tangible, as no government report could possibly do, the persistence of poverty in the world's wealthiest nation.

Back in the late '60s, social critic Michael Harrington's little tome "The Other America" is said to have sparked President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and its "War on Poverty." That war resulted in some significant social programs, including the pre-school Head Start program, but was ultimately overshadowed by another conflict in Vietnam. Nightly newscasts were soon dominated by firefights and body counts instead of wood cabins in Appalachia and inner-city ghettos.

Likewise, today's intractable poverty will have to compete with the war in Iraq plus record gas prices and the Herculean task of rebuilding New Orleans along with the entire Gulf Coast.

So will the issue of poverty --- which, the U.S. Census Bureau announced on the same day New Orleans flooded, rose for the fourth straight year --- fade from our collective consciousness as it has so many times before?

Another poverty war?

Dr. Sandra Harte, acting department chair of sociology, social work and gerontology at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles, for one, doesn't see any societal changes happening in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"I hear people calling now for another war on poverty," she told The Tidings. "But we are so polarized now that you're either a liberal or a conservative. And any call for change would be framed as how 'these bleeding heart liberals are at it again.'

"Conservatives are going to say, 'We're doing the best we can.' And they will talk about the trickle down theory again, which research has indicated does not work. Trickles don't help the poor. They need a steady stream.

"But it has to become a Republican issue if something is going to happen" she said. "And, unfortunately, the Republican agenda has not been about taking care of the undeserved."

The social scientist was intrigued at how the race issue of victims was not introduced by CNN or MSNBC or even any of the networks. It grew from viewers simply watching the 24/7 coverage of the Gulf Coast's devastation, and realizing: "'Wait a minute! There's something missing here. There's no white faces.'"

Scenes of looters also focused on African Americans. She saw the same black faces over and over during the extensive coverage. Commentators were quick to point out that blacks were stealing items, while whites were just taking what they needed to survive.

"I think that's the same mentality of when somebody sees a bunch of black teenage boys walking down the street, they'll cross to the other side because they somehow believe those boys are potentially so angry and hateful and violent that they are going to willfully do damage to them," she observed.

"And it's a mindset that we haven't overcome in this society. Discrimination is still there. I mean, the civil rights movement, the legislation happened. But we haven't done enough in our society to reconstruct the way we perceive one another."

Harte points out that there are scholarly reports with sound statistics about the lack of health care, educational opportunities and other social resources for the 37 million poor people who make up 12.7 percent of the U.S. population, including 34 percent of the citizens of New Orleans.

But government officials at the local, state and federal levels have paid little or no attention to these reports since the 1960s.

"Because it's going to cost money, and it's going to infringe on the profits that stockholders and corporate leaders make," she said. "Just look at the minimum wage. Every time someone suggests we should raise it, there's an uproar.

"If capitalism is not coupled with altruism and social justice, it's lethal to people who are marginalized. And, unfortunately in our society, that has consistently been the poor like the people you saw in New Orleans."

Harte points out that the living wage federal contractors are required by law to pay workers has been waived for Katrina reconstruction projects. Corporate and individual speculators are already on the scene buying up land all over the Gulf Coast, while global companies like Haliburton are landing major recovery contracts. And it looks like the new New Orleans will be made up of many more condos and lofts than low-income housing.

"I guess I'm discouraged," the scholar admitted with a sigh. "We have so much good will rushing out of us right now, giving money to the Red Cross and other charities. But just throwing money at people isn't going to change things.

"We need to have a whole national initiative about this or the poor in the south, and across the country, will be back in the same condition," she said. "And our underclass will just keep growing."

The blame game

According to Msgr. Gregory Cox, executive director of Catholic Charities of Los Angeles, it's hard to say what will happen after a disaster the size of Katrina pulls people out of their regular routines. But he says, for the most part, after the media stops focusing on victims, the general public forgets about them, too.

"The history of these disasters that highlight the issues of poverty and race is that once the attention is taken away from the particular problem, we go back to our regular pattern response," he said.

The "who's responsible" game is also pretty complicated. Msgr. Cox points out that people on the right blame the left, and people on the left blame the right. Typically, we focus on the government, too, whether that be at the federal, state or local level.

But he believes the business community, not-for-profit sector, pubic and private education systems as well as the church all play a part when it comes to the social problems of a poor state like Louisiana.

"One of the obvious things is the church needs to continue to promote the basic teaching of the Gospel, and the pastoral letters and encyclicals that deal with social justice issues in our society," he said. "And to remind people within our own faith community of our responsibility to reach out to those who are most vulnerable in our society, "The other dimension is the church must play a role as bridge builder --- of bringing people from the left and right and moderates together," he added. "It doesn't make any difference where you are on the political spectrum, if there's someone who's homeless on the street, what do we do to address that issue?"

Catholic Charities of Los Angeles is asking parishes across the Los Angeles Archdiocese to adopt a family made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. Usually, the parish would provide housing for the evacuees, while Catholic Charities' case mangers will connect the newcomers to mental health services plus provide transportation, employment counseling and other social services.

"We're in this for the long haul, after the American Red Cross stops providing emergency assistance," Msgr. Cox reported. "We obviously need support for this new program. But we're hoping that people don't forget later down the line that we're out there working with Los Angeles' poor."

Left-behind people

"When we look at poverty in this country, we find that it is a constant in daily life, and it doesn't merely surface in times of tragedy and emergency," said Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet Darlene Kawulok, who chairs the religious studies department at Mount St. Mary's College. "So what we experience in the Katrina event, I think it was a mirror back on us as a country of how we treat the marginalized and the poor," she said.

The teacher of social ethics says the major casualties were the working and elderly poor who lacked the means or the wherewithal to leave New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas devastated by the hurricane and storm surge. They were, in short, part of the millions of Americans living below the poverty line, including more children born into poverty today than ever in our history.

Although she's appalled by President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that have taken away funds and benefits for low-income families, she doesn't totally blame the current administration. Long-term policies, she asserted, have set us on a road where we have forgotten who we should be taking care of. And we have become a society of consumers versus voters holding our policy makers accountable for maintaining the common good.

"For Christians, I feel we need to move back to an understanding of what 'covenantal' relationship is," Sister Kawulok stressed. "And it is basically the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak are to be cared for.

"When you look at what happened in the Gulf Coast, you basically see people who were left behind. They were discarded. And the spiritual significance for people to reflect upon in this isn't just one isolated incident, but how we have consistently left these people behind.

"But," she pointed out, "an imperative of a covenant relationship of which God calls us to is, 'They shall not be left behind.'"

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin promoted a consistent ethic of life called the "Seamless Garment," yet very few Catholics are totally life-oriented from birth to death, according to Sister Kawulok.

"My bottom line is as a Catholic I have to have an option for the poor," she said. "And I have to advocate for choices that support the common good. In my estimation, none of those were met in this tragedy, nor in the last number of years of many administrations in their handling of the issues of poverty, education and jobs in this country."

Being sorry isn't enough

Ozie Gonzaque was born in Monroe, La., and raised there until she was 16. Her parents insisted that their children live with dignity. So she didn't realize how poor her family really was until people told her.

In 1944, her parents moved to Watts, where she's lived ever since. She and her husband Roy, who died in 1991, raised three daughters in South L.A. She volunteered for 18 years, from 1984 to 2003, as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Housing Authority, where she served as chairperson of the board for 10 years.

During those years of service, the African American woman traveled across the country visiting housing projects and programs in other cities, including New Orleans in 1995. The projects in the Crescent City were the "biggest disgrace" she'd ever seen.

"I really think the problems we all witnessed on TV were not as much racial as indifference," Gonzaque said. "In our country, we tend to look at people and judge them by what we think they have in their pockets.

"So I think it's more because they were poor people --- period. Because they're insignificant to some of the leaders, and they are not going to raise any cain. They're not going to cause any problems when it comes time for election. So why should they worry about them?"

The former housing commissioner believes Katrina did shine a spotlight on America's poor --- at least for a while. But when the media in the Gulf Coast pack up their cameras and notebooks, the shoddy housing, bad schools and minimum-wage jobs will still be there.

"But I hope this will spark a determination in all of us to realize that we have to stop looking at people simply because they're poor financially," Gonzaque stressed. "We have to stop looking at them as victims. We have to start trying to provide means for them to get out of poverty.

"Because just being sorry for them isn't enough," she said. "If we don't encourage and inspire people to become independent --- and I mean independent enough to contribute to society --- then it's never going to change."