CABL Forum - Re: answer some questions

Whether anyone agrees or not, I'm passing this along to let you know what
others may think and are saying.
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 rdinary 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 hey 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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Re: answer some questions