From: Ed (mojoedd@bellsouth.net)
Date: Sat Sep 03 2005 - 14:33:32 PDT
Thanks Royce, that says it all and it does make sense! Thanks for sharing
this with us, it is most appreciated!
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Royce C Hayes" <rc_hayes1@juno.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 16:15
Subject: [MV] Battle of New Orleans - 2005
> 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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