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Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."

Post-Katrina dialogue on poverty fizzles
By ALLEN G. BREED
AP NATIONAL WRITER

Don't tell the Rev. Randall Mitchell that Hurricane Katrina somehow opened people's eyes to the depth of poverty in this nation. Americans knew the extent of the problem long before the storm, he says. They'd just learned to live with it.

"They've come into acceptance of it," the preacher says from the apartment he evacuated to, in Dayton, Texas, 300 miles west of New Orleans. No, rather than revealing poverty to Americans, he says, the storm "exposed ... the people who maintain it. That's all."

When Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless. To taste hunger and feel thirst. To go without medical care or even toilets.

And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. The desperate, angry masses at the Superdome and convention center. The rampant looting. The floating bodies.

With much of New Orleans still under water, President Bush stood before the stately St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and declared the nation had "a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." It didn't happen, many say.

"From my perspective, it's kind of like one hand clapping," says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. "We'd love to have a dialogue, but there needs to be someone to have a dialogue with."