Dropping everything and leaving ISN'T THAT EASY, people.

A recurrent thought I've seen bandied about -- and yes, I myself entertained it, before I thought more clearly -- is "Why the hell didn't they all just leave the city when they had the chance?" And as I was perusing the comments thread of the Jane Galt post I bitched about in the post preceding this one (which isn't a bad post in itself, actually; what I was bitching about was the lame link-blocking shit), I found this brilliant nugget of wisdom, left by someone going by "kc":

I have heard the arguement that many individuals who chose to stay did so because they had no resources to leave.

If someone said there is a million dollars waiting for you two hundred miles away on a park bench -I wonder how many people would have found the resources to get to that park bench.

This would paint more accuate picture of those who truely did not have any means of leaving.

That sums up the mindset, doesn't it? They didn't want to leave. They didn't think there was enough incentive to leave. They were, literally, too stupid and lazy and slothful to leave.

This may be the single stupidest comment I have ever seen online. Anywhere, in any forum -- be it blog thread, Usenet newsgroup, Internet message board, chat room, you name it. I guess to this person, all of life is a sweepstakes and the reason so many people are screwed right now in New Orleans is because they didn't find the grand prize scintillating enough to enter the contest in the first place.

Of course, none of these people can really know what it is to be poor. Not "what it's like", not "what it looks like", not "what being poor resembles" -- but what being poor actually is. And I don't know, either. But I bet I have a lot better idea than the "They were too lazy to leave and now we gotta bail 'em out" crowd.

Here's what being poor is, at least in part. A few of the items on this list hit home for me, because they apply. But for someone who actually is poor, all of the items on this list apply, every minute of every day.

Being poor is not, for the vast majority of the people who actually are poor, a matter of choices gone awry or left turns at Albuquerque not taken. It is, for the vast majority of them, a soul-crushing reality to be endured from birth to death, from which there is almost certainly no escape, figuratively and now literally.