An Unnatural Disaster
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski It has taken four long days for state and federal officials tofigure 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 onthere. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think thatwe are confronting a natural disaster. If this is just a natural disaster, the response for publicofficials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you sendtransportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you sendengineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. Forjournalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism ofordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication ofdoctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up andrebuild. Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would haveto do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if theyare suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--didnot expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, butabout 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 responseby federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by HurricaneKatrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel hasgotten the story wrong. The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did nothappen 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 beconfusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in anemergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in otheremergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been sayingthat this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even whatwe expect from a Third World country. When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to theoccasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and theyspontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especiallytrue in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our owninitiative 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 maintraffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of theircars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through theintersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers toSeptember 11). So what explains the chaos in New Orleans? To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is adescription 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; andpolice and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on. "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmenpoured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire.... "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardenedArkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-killorders. " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in thestreets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. Thesetroops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so ifnecessary and I expect they will.' " The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies thisarticle shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, ridingon an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble ofsqualid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. Itlooks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad. What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excusefor an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs tostorm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the driversto drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack thedoctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing furtherdestruction? 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 asense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox NewsChannel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studiedarchitecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in theSouth Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one ofthe largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," asthey were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediablesqualor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.) What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was awhiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--theinformational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most newschannels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of theresidents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and ofthe 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's publichousing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact:early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan forevacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let manyof them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these twopopulations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live inthe housing projects, and vice versa. There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans whenthe deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people fromtwo groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, overdecades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. Thewelfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administrationof New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves. All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetenceof the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of thecity, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a citycorrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure theflow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to politicalsupporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency. No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. Infact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, forexample, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans haddrafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piecefrom the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames thechaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite:the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite ofindividualism. What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences ofthe welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency isbehavior that is normal for people who have values and take theresponsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to adisaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome thedifficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that thegovernment hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disasteras an opportunity to prey on their fellow men. But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry aboutsaving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't ownanything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses orhow they are going to make a living? They never worried about those thingsbefore. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolenwealth is a way of life for them. The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality itsustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moralugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one isreporting. Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005