bobs94formula
09-11-2005, 09:59 PM
If this is a repost.... oh well. It's a bit long though, so all our ADD members need to move on;)
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
An Objectivist Review
by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist
September 2, 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 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_ (http://tinyurl.com/auyju) :
"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_ (http://tinyurl.com/9hu4u) .)
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://tinyurl.com/ah5j7) , 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
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
An Objectivist Review
by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist
September 2, 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 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_ (http://tinyurl.com/auyju) :
"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_ (http://tinyurl.com/9hu4u) .)
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://tinyurl.com/ah5j7) , 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