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
Agreed that the federal destruction of the inner city family and the replacement of personal responsibility with government responsibility played a part here.
Question: Did the authorities release criminals from jails into the streets of New Orleans?
This piece suggests they did.
Libs Lie and people die.
Yes, it was reported that they did. Now, remember there is no State Prison there, so these were the local bad actors in for less serious offenses, or a smaller population of really nasty characters awaiting trial. Probably lots of drug dealers, thieves, and gangsters, and a few rapists to boot.
Hmmmmmm
Looking at the hoards of people in the Superdome, Convention Center, etc. I was struck by their helplessness. They seemed to be like children, waiting for an adult to rescue them. In a British article yesterday I read about a group of British students who had the wherewithal to group together for protection, putting the women in the center and placing chairs around for protection. I wonder if families with children thought of doing this to protect against roaming predators. Personally, I would have sought out other families like ours and got SOMETHING organized, for Pete's sake.
They just looked like sheep waiting to be preyed upon, and preyed upon they were. I can't help but wonder if they believe they will inevitably be victimized, and so they just wait their turn.
IOW, I just saw a lack of gumption, drive, creativity. I'm certain they were, and still are, in shock. But to sit and wait for days on a bridge? Come on.
Having said that, I am so glad they have been relocated. Perhaps getting out of inner-city NO may give some of them a chance at a better life and a more hopeful future.
Yes,theses people must be giving hope give jobs so they
can get off the WELFARE TRAIN of DOOM.
Thanks for posting the article.
A few of us were on to it yesterday.
This fiasco in NO represents basically a state-wide failure of govt.
Much of the state appears to have been appointed in a political patronage manner. From US senators down to the lowliest policeman,many of whom have deserted, the failure of state and local govt. is ever pervasive and disgusting.
Nice rant!
I wonder how many lives might have been saved if the N/O "Officials" would have used their collective (empty lib) heads and offered to bus the poor and sick out of town.........before the wind hit, instead of waiting until it was in full force and trying to blame their incompetence on others.
I can hope and imagine that property and business owners will want to rebuild parts of NO, particularly the French Quarter and the Garden District.
I don't know what poor homeowners will do, but I surely hope the federal government doesn't just build a lot of "projects" in NO for the ghetto dwellers to move back into, they'll just turn the whole thing into a dangerous inner city ghetto all over again and likely wreck the place soon enough. People need to have personal investment of some kind in the property they live in.
Are you certain they wern't Rush Gitmo shirts?
Look. All I'm saying is to wait for more official confirmation.
Sounds like Arkansas under someone we've all come to know and dislike, doesn't it.
Excellent, excellent post! And another huge example to how socialism/communism does not work - as one poster calls it "learned helplessness." It's something I work with my kids on all the time - teaching them to take the bull by the horns and take ownership of their lives.
Only difference is - these are kids and that's natural - they learn from their elders (hopefully) to be responsible. In this case, their "learned helplessness" was encouraged and promoted.
Well, the good news is that they are going to Texas and Arkansas where school means No child Left Behind and welfare reform is effectively implemented. I haven't seen them going to any blue states, have you?
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