- "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 Superdome?"
-
-
- 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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