Return to New Orleans... wow
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An interesting article I found about the people that were remaining in New Orleans after the storm....
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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare Stateby Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005It 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.
DaveH
'94 Supra- 7.77 @ 176mph -
Wow, that makes a lot of sense. Never thought of the shit going on down there right now that way.
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That is very true.
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alot of those people are junkies. they have not been able to get any drugs, cigarettes, and coffee for days. i don't know about them, but i get a little edgy from not having a cigarette. i think that withdrawls from crack and other drugs like that would be a lot worse.
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It's weird how our government can bomb a country overnight, yet after four days, most people don't even have rations...
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They need to get more national guard troops in there and enforce Martial Law. It truely is the only way to stop the fucking looters and the retards that shoot innocents that are trying to help them.
Problem being a very large majority of our weapons, troops, and military vehicles are over in Iraq fighting the pointless war.
I view whats going on down there as our own little Iraq.
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I agree with everything you stated in that last post Dave, I tried to pick it apart and try and pull the right wing agenda out of it but it made pretty damn good sense. The only thing I have a slight issue with is stating that everyone on welfare is abusing the system. I agree that a lot are, but certainly not all. Oh, and 25% (the people remaining) of 500,000 (total people in N.O.) is 125,000 not 300,000 as listed above.
The thing that gets me is that FEMA had this situation in N.O. listed as the #3 worst thing that could happen to the USA. This info was assessed and made public after the attacks on NYC 4 years ago. They pretty much outlined exactly what would happen in this city should there be a hurricane. Once again, the White House ignored a memo and failed to have the proper plans in place (or even thought out) on what to do in this case.
http://www.swingstateproject.com/2005/08/katrina_proves.php
This article kind of shows the other side. Though I don't disagree with Daves comments I think it only fair that people be offered both sides.
Yes, the gov't didn't make the people down there turn on each other. They didn't make the people loot/riot. What they did do was fail to have a plan in place for such an event. Period.
Now before anyone says "well, you hate america" (and I'm not refering to wes's comments) let me add that had I had my way 12 years ago, I would be in the Army today. I tried to sign up but had a physical condition that would not allow it.
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And as far as chuck stating that the white house ignored FEMA... not only did they ignore them. Bush cut the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers this summer for the 3rd year in a row. So they didnt have the funding to fix the levees or even prepare for something like this.
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Flowcus wrote:
And as far as chuck stating that the white house ignored FEMA... not only did they ignore them. Bush cut the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers this summer for the 3rd year in a row. So they didnt have the funding to fix the levees or even prepare for something like this.I believe the amount they needed to shore up the levees was 40 billion. None of the past administrations thought is was a good idea to drop that much on one city either. Even the "lefts" savior Clinton. Hell, he was sitting on a huge surplus too! The priority for this administration is the war on terror. Can you imagine what would happen if terrorist cordinate a dirty bomb scenerio in multiple cities? You could take Katrina and multiply it. I wonder what was 1 and 2 on FEMA's list?
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I think it's sad that armed troops are even needed down there. What is this world coming to?
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they have a town called new town, because the old town was flooded by sakakawea (I don't care if it's spelled wrong) I think they should all move above sea level. That would make sure that this never happens again.
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fallguy wrote:
I believe the amount they needed to shore up the levees was 40 billion. None of the past administrations thought is was a good idea to drop that much on one city either. Even the "lefts" savior Clinton. Hell, he was sitting on a huge surplus too! The priority for this administration is the war on terror. Can you imagine what would happen if terrorist cordinate a dirty bomb scenerio in multiple cities? You could take Katrina and multiply it. I wonder what was 1 and 2 on FEMA's list?#1 Nuke NYC
#2 Terrorist attack on hoover damI agree, there is no precedent for this. But this happened POST 9/11, and that was the day (according to the right) that changed the way we need to look at everything, therefore all past precedents need to be ignored. Thats how we justified a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, right?
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I agree with moving above sea level. They are saying they are going to clean up and what not. What are you going to save in a building that water was above the roof. Absolutely nothing. What are they thinkin. and let it be. Screw wastign money to build it over so it can happen again sooner or later.
Matt
92 Civic HB
JDM d15b w/14b@8psi
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