New Orleans, a man-disaster for over 40 years!

[Guest guest]

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