I found this article and thought it very enlightening. Something to think about.
*An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State*?
*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 day s. 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 an d 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, 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
