From: Royce C Hayes (rc_hayes1@juno.com)
Date: Sat Sep 03 2005 - 13:15:14 PDT
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
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
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