A new take on NO

[racer]

by Robert Tracinski

 

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

 

That makes sense to me.

[350TwinDeathBed]

Me as well. Scary situation.

[rocketboy]

sounds bout right give a new orleans resident a fish,he eats for a day... try t o teach him to fish he will shoot your ass for trying t o push your radical agenda on him .i saw footage of a women refusing a m.r.e . (meal ready to eat) from a national gaurd in protest. these peeps are so used to milking our system that some wont even take nurishment offered t o them . even a timid wild dog will accept food from a stranger. whic h only proves my point ...lets just backfill the entire place in and start over with working class people who have something to offer this country instead of take from it

[RNBRAD]

Good find Cole.

[PUSH THE THROTTLE]

Amazing we were just discussing this exact thing over the weekend. Then we decided it can't be true because if that's the case we can't blame President Bush and that's really the goal for our country now, right?

[racer]

that's really the goal for our country now, right?

412144[/snapback]

sure as hell seems that way.

[Toomey Banshee]

Its an unbelievable situation over there I would imagine. Whats worse is the shit-ums seem to be thriving. Free handouts for many years at its best. Let it rot.

[Redlined]

That story has a familiar tone. Good Find. This is the type of thing we need to be discussing as a country.

[jadaven]

sounds bout right    give a new orleans resident a fish,he eats for a day... try t o teach him to fish he will shoot your ass for trying t o push your radical  agenda  on him .i saw footage of a women refusing a  m.r.e . (meal ready to eat) from a national gaurd in protest. these peeps are so used to milking our system that some  wont even  take nurishment  offered t o them . even a timid wild dog will accept  food from a stranger. whic h only proves my point ...lets just  backfill the entire place in and start over with working class people who have something to offer this country instead of take from it 

412134[/snapback]

 

Yeah I heard about that MRE thing on the news, it was late over where I'm at, so they don't cook meals at night. So they give us MREs. And as I'm sitting there cooking my spagetti and meat sauce MRE, a woman on CNN or Fox News was complaining about "ARMY" food. I am a little disgusted in the way people are complaining about things that they are not getting down in NO, I mean in the state of emergency they are in and expecting that food be brought to them on a silver plater. I highly doubt any of the remaining "refugees" ever had that. The people down there are expecting impossible things, i guess thats the expectation when you rely on the goverment all your life. Well I have news for them, they should be thankful for what they have. They are alive and if that isn't enough well I can think of many worse things than having to choke down an MRE. Many people live off those daily, the same people that are over seas, in IRAQ getting shot at so that hopefully in a couple months...or years they can come home, everyday they don't know if they are coming back. well those people are home, and they are getting taken care of. they are not being asked to do anything except wait.

 

All in all, shut up and eat the Fu**ing MRE you ingrateful peice of sh**.

[MILO]

that's exactly the type of info that needs to be put out there. it's one thing for somebody who makes an effort to make ends meet and take care of their family and things, and still need a little assistance from the state or whatever. it's another to just be a worthless piece of shit sponging off of the rest of us who pay in out of our checks to support their sorry asses cuz they are too lazy to take care of themselves. these people have no sense of pride or dignity, and the truth of their nature has come out, only they are thought to be victims driven to doing these things out of desperation due to the circumstances, rather than just assholes taking advantage of a bad situation and just being themselves. ungrateful worthless lazy ass sons-a-bitches too bad the waters don't distinguish between decent people and waste of oxygen people and segregate them, above or below the water. all they've done now is invaded some other area to bring down to their level.

[BansheeBrian]

MRE's are great when your hungry.I can't believe that woman rejected them.Those things have roughly 2500 calories.Alot of work can get done with that many calories in your gut.

Why the hell won't they just leave? It's not like they are waiting on a big job interview or for the mail man to paddle up and slip a gov't lazy check in their mailbox.

Enema Katrina has done her work flushing out the impurities.

[RNBRAD]

I've noticed a city in my area has refused to allow any of the evacuees to be sent there as the gov was planning on doing. I'm sure others will follow suit. That's why you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The governement might tolerate this kind of ungratefulness but the citizens won't.

[Cotton eyed Joe]

That makes sense to me.

412121[/snapback]

Good find Cole!

 

Something else I've found amuzing is the brigades of global warming freaks squealing about OH GLOBAL WARMING THIS IS PROOF! But on the news they sort of dispelled that myth being they had a hurricane like this back in 1919 or so.

[CombatTalon2]

Yeah, this is correct. These people are the bottom of the barrel so to speak. And just like was mentioned earlier, they are spreading these people out all over the nation. I know Tucson is supposed to get like 1000 of these evacuees over the next couple days. They plan on enrolling the kids in the Tucson school system and help the others get jobs. But when they didn

[racer]

which city brad? better be OKC, thats the last we need is them govt moochin fuckers in there.