apollo24
09-08-2005, 10:36 AM
I found this article quite interesting and in most aspects dead on, and it exposes the side of New Orleans people outside of our region don't/won't/won't want to see.... (nor will CNN ever reveal it)
-Apollo
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.
-Apollo
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.