The unnatural disaster
The unnatural disaster
Found this article. Thought it was interesting.
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:
"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
Copyright(c) 2002 The Intellectual Activist
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:
"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
Copyright(c) 2002 The Intellectual Activist
Last edited by LionPride on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Gunner18
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finally someone has the guts to speak out against the ghetto! give me your sick and your tired my behind! i say get them the heck outta this country and youll see a much better, more prosperous US of A! then again what do i know?
Last edited by Gunner18 on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
STRAIGHT
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Pale Rider
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Re: The unnatural disaster
Lion Pride- "I love you, man!". Sing it out loud and proud. That's the REAL, honest to GOD truth.
Last edited by Pale Rider on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"What we've got here is...failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it anymore than you men." -Strother Martin, COOL HAND LUKE
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fleaflicker
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I never thought of that as a result of the housing projects and jails, but that is actually a very good point. Many of the people who were left behind in New Orleans were so poor they didn't have a way out, and of course, it would make sense that many of those would be from public housing projects or prisons. The government may not have responded in a timely manner (which is another story entirely), but many of those left behind are either cons or ex-cons. So the question is, now that this has happened, what do we do about it?
Last edited by fleaflicker on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"To give anything less than the best is to sacrifice the gift." -Steve Prefontaine
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Gunner18
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i say break the rest of the levees and let the entire city flood and rename it atlantis II. as for the people that dont want to evacuate...those that survive can get a free pass to mexico. and all the refugees that are in houston and elsewhere that didnt leave when they should have? same thing...send 'em to mexico, we dont need that many idiots stickin around ruining this country. im sorry if that offends anyone but for cryin outloud, all they want is for the government to take care of them, well tough crap, learn to take care of yourself! this country needs to do away completly with welfare, and those that are on it need to ship up or ship out. period. our economy would go through the roof if we got rid of all the free loaders.So the question is, now that this has happened, what do we do about it?
wow, that felt good getting all that off my chest.
Last edited by Gunner18 on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Pale Rider
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Re: The unnatural disaster
Did anyone else see or hear the comment from one of the flood victims, (who just happened to be "of color"), "Who's gonna PAY MY bills? She, along with many others in that immediate area, did not leave when they had the opportunity, because they didn't want to MISS THEIR GOVERNMENT CHECKS! And the mayor....bless his little discriminating heart.....he was waiting for the FEDS to send in Greyhound COACHES to evacuate his po' folk because it was BENEATH him to think his people should have to be BUSSED in big yellow taxis. They couldn't even move those same school buses to safe ground- now they along with everything else there are useless to anyone.
Last edited by Pale Rider on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"What we've got here is...failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it anymore than you men." -Strother Martin, COOL HAND LUKE
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fleaflicker
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Yeah yeah yeah. Some people are less fortunate than the rest of us, and have very hard backgrounds to overcome. It doesn't mean that they can't, but it means that they are more likely to be making less money. That doesn't mean that they are criminals or cons, it just means that they're poor.
Last edited by fleaflicker on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"To give anything less than the best is to sacrifice the gift." -Steve Prefontaine
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fleaflicker
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What really makes me wonder is why didn't New Orleans better prepare for a catastrophe such as this. They were saying on the news before the hurricane made landfall that this is the type of storm that the city always feared, and they knew it could happen. A large amount of that is due to the city lying, for the most part, below sea level, which would make it really prone to flooding. The levees were designed to prevent that, but they could only withstand storms of up to Category 3. Katrina, of course, was a very strong Category 4 when it made landfill. So, when the storm made landfall, the levees broke. Why didn't they work on these things just in case worst came to worst and something like Katrina hit? The city was under 20 feet of water (in some parts) shortly after the hurricane, and people were on the roofs of their houses. This wasn't because of the rain the storm brough, but because the levees broke and let all the water in (such as a lake right next to them). They were, unfortunately, very ill prepared for this storm, after fearing it for all these years...
Last edited by fleaflicker on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"To give anything less than the best is to sacrifice the gift." -Steve Prefontaine
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Pale Rider
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Re: The unnatural disaster
New Orleans was an accident just waiting to happen. It's like posting a 3 ton weight limit on a bridge- sooner or later, a vehicle will choose to ignore the warning and cross it, and will be greater than the recommended limit. I would assume the prohibitive cost of building levees and storm protection for a C5 storm was the main reason everyone crossed their fingers every time a hurricane headed their way. Precisely why the town as it was should NOT be rebuilt. Now on a slightly different note, their was a disaster drill just about a year ago, in which New Orleans officials were to prepare for the worst-case scenario, a C5 storm, with an expected 100K casualties, massive devastation, etc. They discovered many logistical problems, and were to prepare plans to improve or fix them. They chose to do NOTHING! So when the Federal Government reduced funding for certain Corps of Engineers projects, it was decided New Orleans should spend the money they received for "Lock improvements." Not a dang thing for levee or canal improvements. Granted, there NEVER could have been enough to prevent what happened. The money was granted by CONGRESS, not George W. Bush. That good ol' boy Democratic southern political system took care of the people didn't they. Now they only want to point the finger at GW. Deny personal responsibility and pass the buck. It's what Democrats do best.
Last edited by Pale Rider on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"What we've got here is...failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it anymore than you men." -Strother Martin, COOL HAND LUKE
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fleaflicker
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Actually, the preperation was for a simulated Category 3 that would strike the city dead center. And you're absolutely right, they did nothing about it. And it's not GW's fault alone, it's the fault of the entire government system (from national level on down) for not funding fixing the levees and making the necessary preparations, and for not having an adequate response time when disaster did strike. The Japanese media was in New Orleans sooner after the hurricane struck than FEMA!!
Last edited by fleaflicker on September 20th, 2011, 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"To give anything less than the best is to sacrifice the gift." -Steve Prefontaine