Subject: The Real Problem
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 ove r
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 sm all 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 furth er
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 phases
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 eva cuated 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 away 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, 200
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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 ove r
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 sm all 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 furth er
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 phases
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 eva cuated 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 away 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, 200
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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