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 vehicles, 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.
