by Robert Tracinski
It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
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 one 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
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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This opinion article was submitted by one of our gentle Weber County Forum readers. I think it's an interesting "take" on the Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans story that's dominated the news for the past week. I'm thus throwing it out for discussion.
Mr. Tracinski raises an interesting question, I think. Rather than being the result of an inadequate or incompetent response by federal and state relief agencies -- or the force of mother nature herself -- is it possible that the chaos and bedlam that's been reported in New Orleans is actually the natural and inevitable consequence of forty years central-planning by our elitist and communalist American social engineers and urban-planning czars?
Does the story of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath have implications which may be applicable to our own local communities?
Comments, anyone?
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5 comments:
Did somebody just leave a spam comment and not leave the address? That's pretty smart.
I hate it when people leave messages like that.
...is the chaos and bedlam that's been reported in New Orleans actually the natural and inevitable result of forty years central-planning by our elitist and communalist American social engineers and urban-planning czars? Does the story of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath have implications which may be applicable to our own local communities?
Very good and thought provoking article, Rudi! Thank you for posting it.
I agree with the writer's thesis that marginalized groups of people have a different orientation to society as a whole than those who are "accepted" or are contributing members of it. And his comment that people who own nothing and do not make a living have nothing to lose and therefore, living off of others is a way of life for them, I think is quite profound.
One thing that really made a negative impression on me when we began living in Ogden was the perception that Ogdenites were actually comprised of isolated groups----isolated in the sense that it seemed that there was no exchange between them. These groups seemed to be formed on the basis of ethnicity, religion, age, economic standing---in short, whatever separates people from one another.
My question about Ogden City ever since has been: Do people gravitate to this way of living because they do not wish to assimilate into the larger community, or because they are not allowed to?
If, though prejudice, people who are "different" because of ethnicity, religious preference, economic strata, etc., are deemed by the powers of a community as somehow unacceptable, and are therefore not hired, not given certain opportunities, or, if they own businesses, not patronized--if their children are bullied or ridiculed in school, and there are odds against them in every area of life, they will naturally split themselves off and form a fringe culture.
And I will toss out that perhaps the Welfare State is not so much a result of humanitarian compassion as it is among those in political power a recognition of the marginalization of certain groups, the wish to keep that marginalization in effect, a twinge of guilt over this, and the subsequent cordoning off of these groups in one centrally planned, officially labeled, "low income" area and the welfare handout.
Somehow, somewhere, the word "poor," used in the economic sense, has come to be synonomous with "not as good as," as in "a poor performance." Therefore, the concept of centrally planned "low income housing," for instance, while on the surface appearing to be noble and humanitarian, in one sense sends a message to a community that the people who live there are in the "not as good as" category. In this way, central planning actually exacerbates the problem of prejudice because of economic disparity.
And those in that situation are very aware of this, and resent it, and New Orleans is in that way understandable. We have this as well as other types of prejudice going on in Ogden too, from both sides.
The question of assimilation into a community is a difficult one, because it has to work both ways. In my opinion, in order to have a healthy society, people must not "make a career," so to speak, out of their religion, ethnicity, or basic separatist group, and they must not demand and get special elitist treatment because of it. Nor should they feel justified in penalizing other groups because those others are not members of their own particular separatist group. In order to have these things happen, however, the whole community environment must be an inclusive and welcoming one, because if it's not, people have nowhere else to go but back into that separatist group.
By "inclusive and welcoming," I do not mean inviting others to participate in the group-think of one's separatist group. Instead, it means simply a focus on our similarities rather than our differences.
The fact that economic, as well as other prejudicial separatism in American society is in fact being officially sanctioned and supported by these government interventions into people's daily lives is one that certainly should be looked at in terms of what this country stands for, both nationally and here at home. The situation in New Orleans has shown us what it leads to.
Outstanding, eloquent post, Dian. You've surpassed even yourself this time.
The chaos in New Orleans brings into focus the flaws in our ever-expanding welfare system of the past half century.
In the 60's, on a quarterly basis, I audited a well-established company in South Chicago adjacent to the Robert Taylor Homes Project.
Because of the danger and crimes in The Project no public nor private taxi would take me from downtown Chicago into that area. The company had to send an armed vehicle to pick me up downtown and deliver me inside the armed complex because of my exposed danger to rape or murder or assault.
The Project housed low income welfare recepients, mostly women, who had a baby every year who grew up to have a baby every year so that generations of welfare mothers received subsidized rent and welfare checks. The men who fathered these babies were not husbands. They lived off of and with the women carrying on their illegal criminal activities. If the couples married they lost all the free benefits.
The squalor and filth was unbelievable. The area became so dangerous that even Chicago policemen did not patrol the area because of the expense and the danger. The Project became a no-man's land because of the government's policies.
Welfare babies growing up in these programs lost all self-esteem and sense of morality. The ingrained attitude became that it was the government's responsibility to take care of them and that they had no responsibility except to hold out their hand for the giveaway.
Despite what Jesse Jackson contends this was not a race issue because all colors lived in the Project.
And now Jesse Jackson is stirring the racial pot again demanding that the U.S. government give each victim of Katrina an amount equal to the amount given to each victim of 9-11.
Why should a victim of Katrina receive a cash amount for having been in the way of a storm but not the cotton farmer who is wiped out by a tornado or drought?
The payments for 9-11 established a dangerous precedent for more massive handouts.
Thanks, ec. Putting those thoughts down is something I've been wanting to do for quite a while, and it was nice to have that door suddenly open on this forum.
When I was attending Ogden High School, my history teacher had a sign above the blackboard which read:
Lean Freedom is Better Than Fat Slavery.
Evidently, looking at this almost every school day for a year made somewhat of an impression, because the concept behind it, that it is better to be free and a bit hungry than well-fed but imprisioned in a situation of no escape has always had the ring of truth to me.
The situation Dorothy describes in her post is worse than any found in any prison, and yet the government was enabling it by subsidizing it. The government had to be aware of this, and yet....viewed this as the best social solution? Amazing.
Creating a situation where people must do less in order to survive and in which the formation of a family unit is an anti-survival act keeps those people from being productive members of their society. Why would their government do this to them? It seems to go against everything we say we believe in.
Very unnatural.
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