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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
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By Robert Tracinski
The Intellectual Activist
09/02/05
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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| by jonathan haworth @ Sep 15 2005 12:45 pm |
| Well said. |
| by Margerie Summers @ Sep 15 2005 01:11 pm |
| But why are they still blaming President Bush??? |
| by Christopher Carlozzi @ Sep 15 2005 03:00 pm |
I too think it is pointless to play the political blame game.
I do think that this is a perfect example of how being dependent on big government can cause major problems for a society. As we conservatives know, government is NOT all-powerful. In a recent 9/14/05 article, Pat Buchanan wisely likened the recent aftermath of Katrina to the culmination a 40 year failed experiment of the "Great Society" brought about by LBJ. While even FDR warned his "New Deal" would cause a "spiritual disintergration" if the welfare state continued for too long and described it as "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.", LBJ thought it would be best to throw money at America's poverty problems.
People waited for government to come to the rescue again...that proved a fatal and tragic mistake for many. These individuals who before the hurricane received food, housing, and support from the government, just followed the normal course of actions during Katrina: they waited for help.
As conservatives we know that self-relieance and self-dependency is they key for a successful future. It seems Johnson's "Great Society" where government attempted to spend millions to fix America's poverty problem came crashing down like much of the Gulf Coast. Poverty has never been eliminated, it is compounded and resulted in a population being dependent on the government to save them from something as devastating as Hurricane Katrina. |
| by Anonymous @ Sep 15 2005 05:04 pm |
| It's not fair to blame the victims in any tragedy like this one, no matter how poor they are. Socio-economic discrimination is just as dangerous as racial discrimination ... |
| by jacob @ Sep 15 2005 09:19 pm |
| I don't think the point is that the people in Louisiana failed. The point is that liberal institutions of government failed them; institutions like welfare. FDR and LBJ failed them. |
| by Christopher Carlozzi @ Sep 16 2005 08:38 am |
That's right, the less fortunate of the gulf coast have been told their whole lives to depend on government, to rely on it, that it will save you when all is wrong.
I reiterate that if the government had been passing out self reliance rather than handouts people may have not been so dependent on the government being their rescuer.
In fact, President Bush echoed these principles last night in his speech to rebuild the area. Money is being used, but for job training and entrpenuerial investment in the area. Not to simply hand out money for a quick fix, but to strengthen the region longterm.
LBJ thought throwing money at the poverty problem would make it go away, 40 years later it hasnt, it has just caused an increase in dependence. The President outlined a way to teach self dependence, so God forbid if there is another disaster, the once poor will have the financial means to simply drive away as many others did, those who did not depend on the government.
It goes back to the old maxim: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. |
| by John Kowal @ Sep 16 2005 10:59 am |
| It's not Bush's fault, it the fault of the Democrat Mayor and Governor that could not get their act together. Did you see the picture of all the school buses in New Orleans parked and under water that could have been used to help evacuate people? |
| by Erich @ Sep 16 2005 12:18 pm |
That's because everyone who was supposed to drive them was able to escape the city in time. None of them stayed around to transport others to safety. So much for bravery and selflessness.
Between the bus situation and all the looting and violence, it's hard to feel sorry for the people down there. You have to take care of yourself if you expect anyone else to care. |
| by jacob @ Sep 16 2005 12:44 pm |
| How about the $51.8 billion relief package? If you ask me, small government was among Katrina's most important victims. There's nothing quite like finding out that 424 members of Congress are willing to pass a 3-page bill to spend $50 billion. |
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