| Subject: An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster |
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Betty
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Date Posted: 14:59:15 09/05/05 Mon
Got this a few minutes ago..
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.
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