The author overstates some things and is too harsh in places, but his central thesis that collapse of New Orleans was a moral failure spanning decades is on target.
The Intellectual Activist
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
Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in New Orleans, I was a delivery driver for Coca-Cola. I’ve been in the New Orleans projects scores of times. Here is how it worked: if you were white you drove back to the plant to pick up a black partner. If the people in the projects saw a black man with you, you did not get robbed of cash or product. If you were alone, there was 90% certainty you would get robbed and all the product stolen.
This, my friends, is the legacy of Jesse Jackson and the types who have told their brothers for a generation the lie that poverty made them victims, that they had no wealth because the white man took it all (think of the mindless looting — where were they going to put the loot?), that personal responsibility is just a white man’s virtue, that the real role-models are rap artists and other criminals, that they would always remain poor — while of course Jackson and his friends got rich. It’s catastrophic social breakdown, and it was laid bare before our eyes this week.
The ignorance from the posts here is what will be the downfall of this great nation. Those that sit back and blame the poor will NOT inherit the earth. God forgive you but I do hope he shows you no mercy. You don’t deserve it.
Who is blaming the poor? The only blame I lay are on thieves who were allowed to operate without restriction in the New Orleans’ projects and Jesse Jackson, for different reasons obviously. How long would thieves operating in your neighborhood be tolerated? Not too long I’ll bet.
Black on black crime is a very serious problem, and the defenseless are the primary victims. (Who do you think got raped in the Superdome? Who do you think did the raping?) What is wrong with a society that cannot protect its own citizens? Who are the primary obstructionists against this kind of protection? What ideas are in play that justify (as you do) this kind of oppressive criminality?
Don’t romanticize the plight of the poor. They are real people like you and me. Your finger pointing, invocation of God’s judgment, and warning that the nation will fall, merely serves to shut down the asking of necessary questions. (A good example, I might add, of the misuse of religion.)
The bad behavior of a few is probably being over-emphasized, just as mostly the negative is being portrayed about the events in Iraq. Many of those forced to stay behind were the “working poor”, those who could not scrape enough money together to pay for the travel involved with moving out of harm’s way. They do exist!
‘”I don’t own a car. Me and my wife, we travel by bus, public transportation. The most money I ever have on me is $400. And that goes to pay the rent. And that $400 is between me and my wife.” Her name is Dorth Dunbar; she was trying to get some rest after days of peril.
Dunbar estimated his annual income to be about $20,000, which comes from doing graphic design work when he can get it. Before the storm, when he and his wife estimated how much money they needed to flee the city, he was saddened by the reality that he could not come up with anywhere near the several thousand dollars he might need for a rental car and airfare.’
If we’re suggesting that the “welfare state” is a government-based plan to keep people feeling “entitled” to something they haven’t earned but are capable of doing so, then yes, it’s a potentially destructive ideology. Work is necessary and edifying. However, we seem to keep bringing up any government provision as falling underneath this umbrella, and in many instances this description simply isn’t applicable.
Here are some current laws on obtaining welfare benefits. I think we need to talk about specifics instead of simply referring to the welfare system as some great noxious evil. What do we cut? A concrete example would be nice because I’m not seeing how Uncle Sam has become “The Great Enabler”.
a) One may NOT receive food stamps if one is:
Further, some TANF requirements:
Work Activities – Activities that count toward a state?s participation rates (some restrictions may apply):
unsubsidized or subsidized employment
on-the-job training
work experience
community service
job search – not to exceed 6 total weeks and no more than 4 consecutive weeks
vocational training – not to exceed 12 months
job skills training related to work
satisfactory secondary school attendance
providing child care services to individuals who are participating in community service.
To sum up then:
Someone has invoked God’s blessing but at the same time sinned against God by expressing hate for another.
The welfare state is bad. (sorry, too concise?)
I think what many people miss about such conversations is that there is no ONE thing that is wrong here. On the surface we see that mistakes in the city, parish, state and federal government have caused SERIOUS issues. It is hard to make a reasonable argument that the government entities involved were addressing the needs, the perceived needs and the media properly. Anger is easy, understanding takes time.
One layer deeper into the issue we find that government entities actually told citizens to NOT attempt to rescue people. This is unthinkable in our country (you are from America, right?) where the citizen is the source of power, pride and hope.
Moving on. The media has focused on Nawlins for some reason. It certainly makes good copy to have pictures of people attempting to wave down the media helicopter while waist deep in what will probably qualify as superfund contamination. Have you noticed many reporters actually helping people? As Chris Tucker said, “put down the camera and help!” How interesting it is that there are people who are sleeping on the foundations of where their house used to be in Mississippi, but no one has even shown up there yet. Some would call having all of their belongings wet but in one area a blessing in disguise. I’m guessing the problems of those not easily identifiable as “oppressed” don’t amount to much. Please remember that what is seen in the media is the result of someone’s decision. There are no images that are sent to your house that are not tainted by the personal feelings and motivations of one or more individuals who have to decide what will sell more advertising or win awards. Moving on again.
Rolling deeper in the mire we can find that one of the founding, understood set of principles used in the development of our country has failed again. God. It is the job of the government to govern, not hand out money, plan your escape for you or put you up in 3 star accommodations. It is the job of the faithful to handle all things charitable and moral. Obviously, that is not working here. Once again we see what happens when we allow the godless to hand the responsibilities of the faithful over to the government. The faithful should give, care for and travel to help those in need without want of repayment, profession of faith or allegiance to God. I hear that some of the most affective help is coming from faith based groups. I’m not surprised.
I know that mentioning that government is not to be held in higher esteem than God could generate some comments from those who don’t believe. But Truth is truth. That is why it bothers so many. Our job is to love them, pray for them and help them in their needs. How they came to have those needs is not our part of the story, but how those needs get met is where we come in.
Why are you still reading? Go forth and do the good works your heart is calling you to.
I would like to see the recipients of any governmental assistance provide a copy of a tax return for last year (or any year). Many of those who remained in New Orleans were supposedly the “working poor”, yet they were living in project housing and didn’t have the money to flee. Those who work get paid every two weeks, while welfare checks come once a month. Perhaps it was the fact that this disaster occurred so far after the first of the month that many were unable to get out.
The sense of entitlement among those complaining on television is staggering. How is it that 75% of the city managed to get out, while the other 25% chose to stay behind with their hands out? Television footage of the evacuees entering the Superdome didn’t show anyone holding a jug of water or a box of food. The vast expectation / assumption that the government will provide for them apparently overshadowed personal responsibility and the concept of taking care of oneself. It was more than likely that mindset of entitlement and blaming that caused those left behind to be in their current life situation.
The whole situation reminded me of the story about the “Grasshopper and the Ants”. Life isn’t designed so that you cannot work, commit crimes, drop out of school and have children you can’t take care of, so that in a time of crisis you are given priority. Priority is reserved for those that plan ahead, demonstrate personal and moral responsibility and give more than they receive. Time will expose the welfare-cases from the self-reliant, just as the storm exposed the minority of our population that makes up the welfare state as the helpless drain on society they are.
First, I largely agree with Tracinski’s position as far as it goes. However, he fails to consider the following:
1. The recipients of welfare are usually uneducated and therefore easily controlled and manipulated by the state that supports them. If you wish to block an intelligent policy initiative that threatens your preexisting interests, simply convince these people that their benefits are threatened and any progressive change is shelved for fear of riots or increased property crime if it is implemented. This is politically useful. It locks in the status quo and keeps the current political elite of both parties, and the more important corporate elite, in power. Any change is therefore either glacial or unintended i.e. the Internet. By some measures we have less political and corporate turnover at the top than the old Soviet Politburo, particularly since both parties agreed on the â??safe districtâ?? policy during the redistricting after the 1990 census.
2. Any disorder that does occur as a result of this policy will not touch the elite, or so they believe, due to economic stratification. Have you noticed the trend toward gated communities and private security forces? Further, any disorder that does occur can be used in the name of security to increase governmental oversight and control of such productive middle class citizens as have managed to survive in spite of globalization.
3. The key to actually changing the welfare state, assuming you could neutralize the present interests that it serves, is education. Any benefits from better education will take at least 20 years to show up in the society. The reverse is also true, hence the gradual decline of the quality of public education without effective action being taken. Even if the base pay of teachers were enough to recruit our brightest into the profession, and we found a method to judge teaching results beyond “teaching the test”, and we paid bonuses accordingly, we would still need to do this at great cost for 20 years before any visible economic and societal benefits began to accrue. None of the current U.S. elites think on that time scale. Everything is either what can I show Wall St. next quarter or how can I will the next election cycle? Therefore public education will not change for the better in the aggregate in the U.S.
4. Japan, China, and India with their older cultures take the longer view more easily especially as regards education and they are becoming the dominant economic force in the world because of it. However, few Americans would wish to live under those systems solely to get long term thinking at the top. Our strength is creativity. To use this strength to compete or cooperate with Asia and India effectively, we must maintain both an educated populace and minimal governmental control of said populace. In my lifetime the trends on both fronts seem to be running in the opposite direction. God help the next generation.