As I have been here in Biloxi, MS, watching and taking part in the best of
human nature rising to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, I have been appalled
at the snatches of TV news out of New Orleans I have been able to watch when
we had the generator running. Shooting at relief helicopters? Raping and
killing small children? What madness! None of this behavior can be justified
by
hunger or thirst. None of it happened here on the Coast. And none of it can be
blamed on the President. Here's an opinion on the situation.
Greg
Subject: FW: Hurricane Katrina-The Welfare State
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_http://www.tiadaily.blogspot.com/_ (http://www.tiadaily.blogspot.com/) )
TIA Daily -- September 2, 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
ArkansasNational 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 ifnecessary 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
driversto 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 andFox 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 away 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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