[Mb-civic] another view

[NPDLP at aol.com]

Hi, M....I agree with some of yours and some of this...I do think welfare  is 
terribly abused, but I feel so sorry for these poor folks. Good to  listen to 
all sides, I believe. xoxo Oneita
 

Subject: An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made  Disaster



An Objectivist Review

An Unnatural Disaster: A  Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the 
Welfare State
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.

Source: TIA  Daily -- September 2, 2005 

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