An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made
Disaster of the Welfare State
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
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It
took 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 also took me
four long days to figure out what was 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
four days last week. 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 a
SWAT team 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 speed away,
frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying
to treat patients at the Superdome? 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 one 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
those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing
projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been
searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to
confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the
corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.] 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 incompetence of the city government,
which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the
knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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. People
living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other
people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those
who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the
Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare
state and its public housing projects. 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 |