An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of
the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
by Robert Tracinski
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
