Posted on 09/03/2005 3:35:13 PM PDT by Chief Engineer
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Not true. There are always bad actors in a chaotic situation.
I agree with what this guy is saying, but I'm troubled that my conservative brethren are getting closer and closer to the kind of bomb-throwing that the Left have been doing every time we take a setback in Iraq.
We need to tone down the finger-pointing. We're in danger of sinking to the level of Ted Kennedy, taking glee in the suffering of others as long as we can blame the other side.
Poor does not equate with "walking brain dead", but welfare sure does!
This current post is a good one. I trust it stays. Thanks, Chief Engineer.
DoughtyOne wrote:
My post saying the same damned thing
Too bad you had to pee on the parade with your annoyance that a post you made yesterday was pulled. Perhaps there was a good reason for pulling it; perhaps it displayed the same temperment that this current reply of yours displayed. Perhaps it was a total mistake that your post was pulled; in which case you could take it easy on whatever admin botched it, and take some delight that your wisdom saw the light of day anyway, over another posters signature.
Why should my temperament be any different? If something is important, and after forty years of welfare state failure, I believe this is, why should I be pleased that this issue was swept under the carpet one more time?
I did not take an individual moderater to task. I merely told the truth. In reading that truth, I would hope some might understand that the posting of fact, is not something to be labeled racism. By removing my post, I was labeled a racist. I didn't appreciate that and still don't.
Chief Engineer didn't write this article. It was attributed to another person. I certainly don't have any problem with this issue being aired under anyone's name. I do however think it a good idea to leave reasoned comments on the forum next time, instead of making implications that are totally untrue.
That is an excellent point! For people who had nothing to eat or drink they sure left a hell of a lot of trash behind.
Welfare also breeds incompetence. Notice how there was little initiative, very few examples of groups of people working together to devise ways out.
Get all theses welfare people working to rebuild there state,stop them from sucking the blood from us.This is nuts
we are supporting theses people its insane,people in the
other states will not like all theses people just sitting
around collecting welfare checks.
I went through a similar experience in 1972 with Agnes. As a 12 year old, it was hard to lose everything, but my parents pulled the family together.
I hope something good can come from this tragedy. I pray that it might.
When it becomes part of their environment time and time again, then even the oblivious will take note at least to a small extent.
If you really want to have your blood boil use the link to TIA and read the article. The author's link, in the article, to the "Globe & Mail" is very important. The G&M did its usual socialist hatchet job. After reading it, I sent Robert Tracinski's article to every Canadian I know.
Very well said, except "liberals" think all of us are unable to think, or care for ourselves.
Good for you.
A perfect expression of what has happened to us by sitting by while a PC society took over.
No they aren't!
They deserve a more respectable title!
Socialist pimps
No, we need to step it up.
You come here and think the ranting is getting too high.
But just step away from the computer and surf the TV for 5 minutes, and you will see nothing but blaming Bush.
This message HAS TO BE SPOKEN LOUDLY. And often. And shrilly.
No one here on FR is blaming anyone for the Storm. Sh*tHappens. No one is really blaming anyone for the flooding. It was a community/Federal decision to design the Levy system only for a Cat 3 storm. Ok. Bad choice made over the last 100 years, only to get undone on the 100 Year storm.
But people here ARE rightly laying the blame for the behavior and the incompetence squarely where it belongs and this NEEDS to be said.
Failure to affix blame means that we will never fix the problem.
All this storm did was expose to the world what a failure the welfare state is.
Most of these people were living in crime ridden hell holes to begin with. Compared to the socialist swamps most of these people came out of, the conditions at the super dome were a vast improvement.
Where was Move-on dot org. Theses bums are great at
getting all welfare people to the polls to vote for dems but in not in
helping them survive a hurricane. I BLAME MOVEON.ORG.
WHERE WERE YOU MOVEON.ORG you really dont care for theses
people.
That's BS.
I saw pictures of the prisnors in their orange jump suits gathered on a bridge.
Indeed, but if we don't it gets worse.
My wife freaked when I told my leftist neighbors my girls are learning to shoot. They got all hot and bothered at the news of course, and wouldn't listen when I told them that I wanted them capable of protecting themselves if they were alone at home or on a hike.
Interesting isn't it, that those same neighbors were robbed recently? It wasn't so hard then to remind them that the nearest cop is a half hour away, at least, and that they might need to be able to protect themselves.
We have to win these battles one at a time, and being "polite" enough to sit quietly while our local majority of liberal idiots blather on without confrontation doesn't cut it.
Yup. Unless we fight back they'll take us down with them.
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