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An Unnatural Disaster:
A Hurricane Exposes
the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
September 02, 2005
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 vehicles, 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: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050902-122920-2415r.htm
"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.....
â*œLast
night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with
shoot-to-kill orders.â*œ
â*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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes.)
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: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20050902.STORMPSYCHOLOGY02/TPStory 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.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Augusta has a welfare problem and we need to address it.
The welfare population keeps getting bigger every day.
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