Television, as everyone knows, is an extraordinary medium, never more obvious than across the past few years with the growth of 24 hour cable news channels that bring us, the viewer, instantly to places of calamity and, sometimes importance, and never more recent than with the pictures from the American south, from our very own gulf. We have seen a wrecked city, ruined and disrupted lives as well as damage done by nature, rather than man or war. We have also seen something that rarely makes it to our screens: poor people.

Thousands of them, a group portrait, proof that the hardest job of all in America is being poor.

The hurricane was devastating for those in its path -- much was lost, the cost is astronomical but the constant coverage was like a national MRI of a symptom many felt but rarely viewed: the fact that the poor exist among us, in startling numbers. These are people who had nothing left to lose; these are people we rarely read about, hardly see and almost never mention.

Many were shocked by the scene at the Superdome, embarrassed that America was unable to get drinking water to American citizens seeking shelter in an American city. Most of the poor in New Orleans are black, as are many of the poor in the rest of our country.

But they are not celebrities, they are not famous, so they don’t get on TV. A lot of them are without jobs, without income, without choices and without hope.

Tonight we’re talking about the disruption caused by Katrina and the threat posed by Rita, but at some point the country is going to have to talk about the hurricane of poverty and race and the invisible damage it does daily to a whole bunch of zip codes beside New Orleans.