New Orleans is a magical city. Just mentioning to people that I lived there evokes pictures in their mind of Mardi Gras beads dangling from trees, parades for no good reason, pink fruity drinks in the middle of the day, great food, bars that stay open all night, and of course music. Jazz musicians whose families have lived in the city for generations, who grew up learning the trumpet, the drums, the guitar, the saxophone from a relative, singing the songs everyone associates with the city--"When the Saints Go Marching In," "Walkin' to New Orleans," "Summertime," and "What a Wonderful World."

It's also a city where 30 percent of its citizens live below the poverty line. When you watch the people on television being loaded onto buses and shipped out to Houston, and wonder, "Why didn't they get out?" you should realize that most of them had no money to do so--many live without air conditioning on a day-to-day basis. They had no family to go stay with in other parts of the country, no friends--some of them had never left New Orleans before.

I watched European citizens being interviewed in the streets last night on MSNBC. Most of them expressed shock that these scenes, the people sitting in the streets at the Convention Center without food and water, were happening in the richest, the most powerful country in the world. One woman said, "It's like a third world country."

I've got news for them. New Orleans was always like a third world country.

We all knew when I lived there that a good-sized hurricane would wipe out the city. There were rumors that the levees were rigged to explode in certain areas so that when the storm surge came, they could choose which neighborhoods to wipe out. The poor ones.

People in New Orleans now wonder why they've been left behind, why they were ignored, why our federal government that can take the time to worry about poverty in Africa, about a repressive regime in Iraq, but can't help them. And they are right to wonder that. News anchors night after night have been thoroughly disgusted at the slow response from the government, and people have rushed to send money and aid. Most of the food and water received in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama has been from private organizations, not the government.

I hope that out of all of this, some good will emerge. I hope that people will realize that we need to think about what goes on in our own country, not just in 'swing states' or in corporate offices, but in the cities where millions of people across America live in third-world conditions without the aid of a hurricane. Maybe we'll stop going to visit those cities and ignoring the conditions in which people live. Maybe we'll stop worrying about tax cuts to the richest 1% and start worrying about the people that live at the bottom before their homes are wiped out by flood waters.