I just recieved the following from one of my Bush-loving family members; decide for yourself how warped their view is.
Full text after the flip...
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 Orleanswith 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
ofNew 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
Copyright© 2002 The Intellectual Activist