Katrina and New Orleans
Oh me, oh my. What in the name of fourteen hells is going on in New Orleans? Why are the victims of the hurricane and flooding so busy tearing themselves apart? Here's an article I found on Wordforge . . .
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 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
Now, while some people amazingly try to blame a hurricane on the President . . . talk about an incredible leap of "logic" . . . this article kind of points out where the real problem is.
You see, this disaster is almost unprecedented in American history. Of course it's going to take a few days to ramp up the relief effort. What, you think the President has access to a Star Trek transporter and can just push a button to make emergency supplies appear in New Orleans? There's a lot of destroyed infrastructure down there. Things like roads and bridges and stuff, meaning that you can't just roll a convoy of trucks into town and start handing out food and water. The trucks have to be able to get to the scene. You've also got thousands and thousands of people who were apparently unable or unwilling to evacuate as they were told to do before the storm and who now need to be rescued. It's already been in the news that the Coast Guard has rescued something over 1200 people in spite of their own local facilities being destroyed. The Navy is sending a carrier and a gator down there with a bunch more helicopters. National Guard troops (who also lack transporter access thanks to Evil Dubya) are arriving in growing numbers.
The worst aspect of this whole disaster is the way some people want to turn this tragedy into another Make George Look Bad smear campaign. Christ on a crutch, isn't there something productive they could do instead? Have they become so filled with hatred and bile that even a catastrophe of this magnitude is just more grist for the "Gotcha!" mills?
Well, at least it shows that the Left is drifting further and further away from the mainstream of America, turning ever more inward on themselves in their little reality-impaired self-congratulatory zones. They are fading as a force in American politics, which can only be good news for the rest of us. Maybe with their nonsense out of the way, we can fix some of the things that need fixing.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 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
Now, while some people amazingly try to blame a hurricane on the President . . . talk about an incredible leap of "logic" . . . this article kind of points out where the real problem is.
You see, this disaster is almost unprecedented in American history. Of course it's going to take a few days to ramp up the relief effort. What, you think the President has access to a Star Trek transporter and can just push a button to make emergency supplies appear in New Orleans? There's a lot of destroyed infrastructure down there. Things like roads and bridges and stuff, meaning that you can't just roll a convoy of trucks into town and start handing out food and water. The trucks have to be able to get to the scene. You've also got thousands and thousands of people who were apparently unable or unwilling to evacuate as they were told to do before the storm and who now need to be rescued. It's already been in the news that the Coast Guard has rescued something over 1200 people in spite of their own local facilities being destroyed. The Navy is sending a carrier and a gator down there with a bunch more helicopters. National Guard troops (who also lack transporter access thanks to Evil Dubya) are arriving in growing numbers.
The worst aspect of this whole disaster is the way some people want to turn this tragedy into another Make George Look Bad smear campaign. Christ on a crutch, isn't there something productive they could do instead? Have they become so filled with hatred and bile that even a catastrophe of this magnitude is just more grist for the "Gotcha!" mills?
Well, at least it shows that the Left is drifting further and further away from the mainstream of America, turning ever more inward on themselves in their little reality-impaired self-congratulatory zones. They are fading as a force in American politics, which can only be good news for the rest of us. Maybe with their nonsense out of the way, we can fix some of the things that need fixing.
posted by Lanz at 12:14 PM
5 Comments:
I haven't seen anyone, and I do mean ANYONE blame Bush for the hurricane. That you say they have is a lie, and you know it. People are blaming the current administration, and rightly so, for their inaction immediately after the disaster.
The time to prepare for an event like this is in the days leading up to it. This storm was forecast as a Force 5 hurricane many days before landfall. While it was uncertain exactly WHERE Katrina would make landfall, it was evident that wherever she landed, people would need help, and need help quickly. Any competent FEMA executive would have had supplies cached in a number of places, ready to roll to wherever they were needed.
Your assertion that "roads and bridges and stuff" were destroyed to the point that the sites were inaccessible is another boldfaced lie. If reporters could drive to the Superdome or the Convention Center, supplies could also have been driven there.
Of course, given that we have helicopters capable of lifting a freaking house doesn't enter into the equation at all. Obviously, helicopters need "roads and bridges and stuff" in order to get to their landing point.
It is true that the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers was cut by every Presidential Administration since Carter.
The Bush Administration made the largest cuts, and they made those cuts after a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was identified after 9/11 as one of the three most likely disasters to hit America (Along with another terrorist attack in New York, and a major earthquake in the LA area.)
The decisions made by this Administration have taken the lives of many good people in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast and displaced many others. Of course, many of those people were underprivileged, so the suffering and death of their families during the hurricane, the horrific conditions at the SuperDome and the Convention Center as they waited for their government to respond with even minimal supplies, and their relocation to other areas of the country is "working very well for them."
Lanz, didn't you come out against Bush's reelection because there were no WMD?
Think of it this way: Bush didn't personally carry out 9/11, but he sure screwed up the aftermath, even Afghanistan.
Similarly, he didn't cause the hurricane, but he crippled FEMA from a funding and expertise standpoint, and generally failed to provide leadership (which, to his credit, is the only thing he did right in the days immediately following 9/11).
To run FEMA, Bush hired a man who had no relevant experience -- who was, in fact, fired from his job working on Arabian horse shows.
That should give you some idea of the priority he made disaster relief, even in the wake of September 11, 2001.
The hurricane isn't the administration's fault, and some level of chaos is to be expected, but the ineptitude they've brought to this is, I'm sorry, just inexcusable.
some people amazingly try to blame a hurricane on the President
Man, what is it about you right-wingers?!? Apparently your arguments are so weak you have to just make shit up to sustain them.
Some people...!
Be prepared for the next hurricane tracker or find another one that's similar. As the Boy Scouts say: "Be Prepared"!
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