Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the

The scholar and prophet Michael Eric Dyson spoke with sorrow and fire when he declared: “Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.” In these words he tears away the veil of illusion, revealing that beneath the banner of shared prosperity lay millions forgotten, abandoned in the hour of greatest need. The storm did not only break the levees of New Orleans; it shattered the myth of equality in the world’s richest nation.

The origin of this truth lies in the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when waters rose and a city drowned. The winds howled, but louder still was the silence of aid, delayed and inadequate. Those with means fled by car or plane, but countless others—poor, black, elderly—were left stranded on rooftops, in the Superdome, or swept away entirely. Dyson calls us to see in this disaster not merely nature’s wrath, but the deep fissures of poverty and neglect that the floodwaters unveiled.

History offers another echo in the story of the Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century. The blight destroyed crops, but it was not famine alone that killed—it was the indifference of the powerful. Food was exported while the poor starved; aid was slow and insufficient. Like Katrina, it revealed that disasters do not strike equally; they expose the burdens already borne by the weakest. And just as Dyson proclaims, the true lesson was not about the storm or the blight, but about justice denied to the poor.

The ancients themselves understood this truth. The prophets of Israel cried out that a nation will be judged by how it treats its widows, its orphans, its oppressed. To ignore the suffering of the poor is to invite ruin, for the gods—or history—will not bless a people who feast while their brothers starve. The flood of Katrina, like the plagues and exiles of old, was a mirror, showing America to itself in a moment of naked truth.

Therefore, O children of tomorrow, remember the lesson Dyson proclaimed: disasters will come, storms will rage, but the true test of a people is how they protect their most vulnerable. America’s poor deserve better than this—and so do the poor of every land. Do not wait until the waters rise to remember them; build a society where no man or woman is left stranded, where prosperity is not a mask but a reality shared by all. For only then will the levees of justice hold against the floods of time.