| Subject: Re: An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster |
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Xpltivdletd
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Date Posted: 10:10:18 09/06/05 Tue
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster" on 14:59:15 09/05/05 Mon
Wow, Betty.
I just re-read it again, after saving it to a Document. I had been at a loss. People needing more rescues, faster than helicopters can lift them--and nobody up in a helicopter will hear someone trapped in their own attic, calling for help. So the mayor calls for lifeboats, and people show up in response...
Why would anyone shoot at these volunteers, as if defending what's theirs from some invading, foreign enemy? Why would anyone shoot at rescue helicopters? It made no sense. It defied explaining in any terms I wanted to entertain.
THANK YOU for posting this article here. It explains not only the violent predation but the rabid defense of the mayor's "planning" I've seen in other forums. In the absence of a better explanation (that word used deliberately), I think Mr. Tracinski has nailed it.
Mayor Nagin wanted everyone else to take responsibility for defining his chain of command, or something to that effect. I could get behind Federal Martial-law in the greater N.O. area, with General Honore as the Military Governor of the region. Think there would be any confusion after that? Thanks again. RKBA! Best regards.
> 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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