New Orleans disaster exposed

[turbodieselbenz]

Won't hear this from mainstream media:

A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski 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 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 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.

[boneheaddoctor]

I say once its drained you burn the place to the ground...then remove all the levies and let nature take its course.

[MTI]

Originally Posted by boneheaddoctor

I say once its drained you burn the place to the ground...then remove all the levies and let nature take its course.

Mother Nature has been saying that about Florida and California for decades.

[boneheaddoctor]

Originally Posted by MTI

Mother Nature has been saying that about Florida and California for decades.

Florida is'nt below sealevel....

[diametricalbenz]

Originally Posted by MTI

Mother Nature has been saying that about Florida and California for decades.

Where are the levies in CA? Maybe Salton Sea would get screwed but we'd have to have an apocalyptic tidal wave.

[MTI]

Originally Posted by boneheaddoctor

Florida is'nt below sealevel....

Having a highest elevation of 345 feet doesn't seem to affect hurricanes.

[MTI]

Originally Posted by diametricalbenz

Where are the levies in CA? Maybe Salton Sea would get screwed but we'd have to have an apocalyptic tidal wave.

In California, every citizen knows it's not a matter of "if" but "when" the "big one" comes that there'll be beachfront property in Nevada.

[boneheaddoctor]

Originally Posted by MTI

Having a highest elevation of 345 feet doesn't seem to affect hurricanes.

Oh I never said it doesn't.....what I did mean is its not like keeping a leaky boat floating......which is an apt description of New Orleans.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by MTI

Having a highest elevation of 345 feet doesn't seem to affect hurricanes.

it wasn't the hurricane that directly caused the problem. It was the levees that were broken indirectly by the hurricane that flooded the bowl that essentially was New Orleans.

Only other place I know of like this is maybe Sacremento area of CA and of course Holland. They, however, took the problem seriously - after a gigantic disaster, of course.

[peragro]

Originally Posted by turbodieselbenz

Won't hear this from mainstream media:

A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski Sep 02, 2005 by Robert Tracinski

Curious as to what publication this came from.

Great article

[MTI]

Originally Posted by narwhal

They rebuilt San Fran on the biggest earthquake fault in the hemisphere

And they're still paying the extra tax from the little Northridge shaker . . . and arguing about rebuilding the bridges. What's going to be interesting is that the downtown SF skyscrapers were supposedly built to earthquake standards similar to those which proved to be less than resistant. The estimated "kill zone" from the glass in the Bank of America Building is roughly a half mile in all directions.

[DieselAddict]

Like I said in another thread, this disaster makes me ashamed of the USA, not just because of the government's slow response, but mainly the anarchy that erupted in this city. My only comfort comes from assuming and hoping that the rest of the USA is more civilized. After reading this article I really see the main problem as the mentality of a good portion of the people who stayed behind. I was really disgusted when I read about the shooting at rescuers, the rapings, lootings and shi*tting everywhere as if they were some animals. Now they still ***** on the floor of the astrodome in Houston even though the restrooms work over there and some even have sex while being surrounded by 10000 other people. What the hell is wrong with these people?

[peragro]

Originally Posted by DieselAddict

Like I said in another thread, this disaster makes me ashamed of the USA, not just because of the government's slow response, but mainly the anarchy that erupted in this city. My only comfort comes from assuming and hoping that the rest of the USA is more civilized. After reading this article I really see the main problem as the mentality of a good portion of the people who stayed behind. I was really disgusted when I read about the shooting at rescuers, the rapings, lootings and shi*tting everywhere as if they were some animals. Now they still ***** on the floor of the astrodome in Houston even though the restrooms work over there and some even have sex while being surrounded by 10000 other people. What the hell is wrong with these people?

I believe, as the article points out, that it's the welfare state. Handouts work in time of emergency, but as a means to support an entire segment of the population for their entire life and that of the children it's a failure.

Regardless of your ethnicity when you believe you are entitled to something that you haven't worked for, and this is beyond your basic civil rights, then you do not value it and you constantly look for more of the same. When you follow a leader who states that that entitlement is based on your ethnicity the problem is compounded. This type of dynamic would work this way no matter what your heritage might be. As evidenced by people of all types of backgrounds being both succesful and poverty stricken. It has more to do with human dignity than it does with race.

As we've gone round and round on other threads about either the "greatness" of the US or as you put it, the shame. Keep in mind that people tend to respond to postive things rather than negative. This is why I never had a problem with stating that the US is a great country and we've done multitudinous great things. We are possible the best country that ever existed. It's not bragging, it's factual. With that in mind we also are capable of extreme evil. Possibly because we're made up of people and this is their nature as well. I think right now there is more need for the positive rather than the negative - there's always time for that. So, moral of the story, you may feel shame because of a few, but also feel pride when you look at the response from the many all of the country, especially Texas.

[boneheaddoctor]

Originally Posted by DieselAddict

Like I said in another thread, this disaster makes me ashamed of the USA, not just because of the government's slow response, but mainly the anarchy that erupted in this city. My only comfort comes from assuming and hoping that the rest of the USA is more civilized. After reading this article I really see the main problem as the mentality of a good portion of the people who stayed behind. I was really disgusted when I read about the shooting at rescuers, the rapings, lootings and shi*tting everywhere as if they were some animals. Now they still ***** on the floor of the astrodome in Houston even though the restrooms work over there and some even have sex while being surrounded by 10000 other people. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Welfare bums (a racially neutral term) are not the cream of the american crop.....or even the human gene pool.

And they proved it when things got rough...