Posted on 09/07/2005 6:53:27 AM PDT by WKB
It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
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 one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
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.
Mississippi and others ping
Good article, one that the LIB MSM will do all it can so that it will never be covered on any station. Because it doesn't play to emotions or their AGENDA!
Good article, one that the LIB MSM will do all it can so that it will never be covered on any station. Because it doesn't play to emotions or their AGENDA!
Nope they'll have none of that.
Because the minute you blame welfare you'll be accused of racism.
Because the minute you blame welfare you'll be accused of racism.
It really is a sad "state" of affairs we are in.
BINGO!
"It is a man-made disaster."
It was a disaster waiting to happen.
What a shame for the folks who live there.
In historical retrospect, the welfare state will be seen as a means for the total state to reduce its human population to the status of livestock.
Spin that, you socialist b*stards!
As I posted on a previous thread, I want to see a complete demographic breakdown on who was left. That the population of NOLA was predominantly black is not a question, it's a fact (60 or 70%). So one would thus assume that all things being equal, those left behind would also be predominantly black. The bigger question is what is the detailed make-up of the people that were left behind? It's definitely way to simplistic to simply call them poor and black. Forget colour for the moment, I would like to see a breakdown on other demographics: 1. How many of these were drug-dealers, gang members, prostitutes, street thugs of one sort or another (my guess is that based on the profile of the people that were at the dome, a very high percentage) and how many of these 'street people' never got the word to get out (let alone being about the hardest group to organize, round-up and evacuate), 2. How many of the thugs planned to stay there simply to loot the place because no one would be around to stop them, 3. How many of those left were ones generally classified as homeless and never got the word to get out (simply because they are street people and thus important information bypasses them), 4. How many that remained had the chance to get out and never took it, 5. How many of these have had the chance to get out SINCE the hurricane and didn't voluntarily take it. 5. And so on and so on. No doubt there were also a lot of decent folks left behind that never had a hope but these may have well been in the minority. My guess is that even with the ineptness by the city and the state, a huge percentage of the ones that were left were destined to stay there because either they were determined to ride it out, never got the word or were so 'busy' doing what street people and thugs do that they wouldn't have left under any circumstances. One thing for sure, colour had nothing to do with anything.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
Posted by TIADaily.com On News/Activism 09/02/2005 2:54:28 PM EDT
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
TIA Daily ^ | 09-02-05 | Robert Tracinski
Posted on 09/03/2005 6:35:13 PM EDT by Chief Engineer
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
The Intellectual Activist ^ | Sept 02, 2005 | Robert Tracinski
Posted on 09/05/2005 3:24:44 AM EDT by etcetera
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
Intellectual Activist ^ | 09.02.05 | Robert Tracinski
Posted on 09/06/2005 5:23:41 PM EDT by Dr. Marten
for your consideration
This has to be the best account of the New Orleans situation I have read. The said fact is that New Orleans isn't the only city that the welfare mindset has taken hold. I know that when the SHTF in American big cities we will see a lot more of this. The advice I am giving to my family and friends is to stock up of food, arms and anything you will need to ride out a disaster and don't depend upon anyone but your family, friends and church.
You're damn right.
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