We've been fighting these liberals for a long time now, and this disaster was for sure an uncovering of the failures of the welfare state.
Posted on 09/05/2005 12:24:44 AM PDT by etcetera
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. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
(Excerpt) Read more at tiadaily.com ...
I like Ben Stein's quote "...imagine if the local authorities were in charge of your healthcare"
Good article. Says it all.
a dead-on article. thanks for posting it
The crime shall be IF we allow our pandering politicians to redevelop the swamp. No amount of money can protect the fools who may repopulate that folly.
The article certainly identifies well the cultural dogma many who were there in N.O. learned from their peers and elders. It's not so much "a welfare state" as it is a cultural indoctrination that appears devoid of other influences.
The truly needy -- elderly without resources, disabled, children without families/parents -- are left to suffer the consequences and further social disinfranchisement brought about by criminal character.
But how it is that so many of those on public assistance were congregated in New Orleans...well, I just don't know how that occured.
Los Angeles, Miami, other cities, take note.
AMEN!
BIG PING
We've been fighting these liberals for a long time now, and this disaster was for sure an uncovering of the failures of the welfare state.
" '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.' "
This is something she should have said before the storm hit.
BUMP
This event has made it painfully obvious that in a disaster situation, the people raised on welfare socialism will just sit helplessly on a bridge for days demanding that people raised on working class ideals come and save them. My question to the welfare socialists is: what kind of morbid perversity drives a person to place welfare housing in a known hurricane target in the first place?
As a graduate of Tulane who spent nearly 3 years in NOLA, the scenes if chaos this week didn't surprise me all that much. When you arrive for orientation as a new student, they give you a packet telling you that you're pretty much risking your LIFE if you drive into a project. A Tulane student is murdered just about every year, or at least that was the case in the 90's. Don't leave so much as a dollar BILL showing in your car, or it will be broken into. The crime, not to mention the squalor, of the projects - is mind boggling for students from suburbian America.
The poorest residents of NOLA basically just brought that level of chaos to the Superdome, as well as the city at large, after the flood. That certainly doesn't mean there weren't some heros in the bunch - people of character, like Jabbar Gibson, the young guy who stole the school bus and took a boatload of people to Houston. I met many wonderful black people in New Orleans, many of whom might have lived in those poor areas - but the sad fact is, the culture itself of the lower classes in that city is very scary, and the projects are absolutely frightening dens of drugs and murder (the city erected a huge billboard by 1 that said "though shalt not kill" - I guess to help remind them!)
Tucker Carlson is one of the only guys I've heard actually call it like it is when talking to Al Sharpton, arguing against the whole race card thing - saying something about how it's so obvious a fact that the poor don't have life as easy as the rich, that you don't even need to STATE it - "that's why nobody wants to BE poor!" - but as this article pinpoints, it's beyond just the culture of poverty we're seeing this week - it's a culture of EXPECTATION. Yeah I'm poor, my survival skills are minimal, and the government damn well better SAVE me, NOW.
I felt awful for the people of New Orleans as I watched this disaster - which was beyond just forseeable - the damn scenario was nearly charted to a tee by researchers and published in the Times Pic several years ago - but I wasn't all that empathetic to the people screeching at the top of their lungs that the government should have been delivering water, diapers, and food - to each and every citizen - a couple of days after the tragedy struck. I live in Anchorage - and if we get a 9.0 earthquake tomorrow - I'm not going to just wander downtown and scream "where's my WATER!!" and wait for the Feds to drop it in to me.
Something is scarily wrong when that big a group of people thinks that after a natural disaster, food and water should be at their feet within 24 hours. Open a history book, for &*#@*(% sake.
The media is ignoring everything from the incredible obesity problem, to the other problems these projects already HAD - in favor of trashing Bush, FEMA, and other officials (who I'm not saying did everything right - not by any means). We need to take a hard look at poverty in this country - and the culture that goes along with it. Does anybody ever remember seeing groups of 250 lb Indonesians angrily screaming "we need HELP!" after the tsunami?
These traits didn't seem to exist in most of those we saw on television.
The article does a good job of covering the key points. The poor are often not accustomed to being challenged to meet their own needs or that of their families, and they don't seem to have the necessary skills to do it.
As God is my witness, I would not have sat stranded on a concrete island for five days hopelessly waiting to die without doing anything to help myself. I really don't get how people could not care enough to want to survive.
Your post is right on and well said. Thank you. I almost wanted to scream at some woman that Fox interviewed who was spitting out a MRE and saying that she wouldn't eat anything like that after she supposedly had gone three days without food. If MREs are good enough for our brave soldiers then it's good enough for a welfare recipient.
What did astonish me was the outright anger about not being given more, not being evacuated faster, etc - with the "thank yous" seeming to be far and few between. And I mostly watched Fox... you do wonder how quickly the Astrodome will become a cesspool, and how quickly crime will rise in Houston. I'm hoping it doesn't, of course! But if it doesn't, that will be more due to the power of those Texans to keep things in line, the whole "don't mess with Texas" thing and all :)
Although I suppose thank yous and good behavior aren't all that sensational, so I do wonder if the networks didn't seek out those elements a bit, so we got the impression that's nearly ALL that was happening. I noticed they finally pulled poor Shep after he went ballistic a night or 2 ago - that guy was just driven to the edge.
Yeah, I completely agree. I like MREs, having bought a bunch while I was in college a while ago, and they tied me over many a time -- at one a day, even.
I felt repulsion when I saw a middle aged woman just after being rescued from the Superdome, angrily bashing/blaming "Bush" then removing her dark glasses (she HAD dark glasses -- just saying, it could've been worse) and staring into the camera, saying more "to Bush," raising her voice even more..
It was repulsive.
I wonder if but what out of the ninety who screamed, "thank you" the news covered the two who were blaming "Bush" and all...
I'd at least like to think so. I do know that what we've seen from New Orleans is a society of people who do not seem to possess the awareness that their survival is up to them. There are few (on FR, anyway) who would even assume that someone was going to come along and solve their problems for them, but what we've seen by many there in N.O. is people who try for the use of threat and intimidation (the guy saying, "there's not gonna be no riot er anything, at least, I don't THINK so...") to try to survive, and don't seem to consider that it's their responsibility to survive. Or, not. None of us would turn our back on someone who was hungry and in need at an emergency (just look at what's taking place now, as to all the helps and good works resulting), but, this emergency has pointed out to others that poverty is not an issue of money so much as it is a condition of mentality and spirit.
I say, save and rescue, help and provide but unless there's some responsibility required along the way, the problems plaguing so many rescued isn't going to change.
This article and your response have said all there is to say. To bad that those who are most in need of reading them never will.
I watched Whorealdo about 4 minutes when he was in front of the Convention Center. I have no idea where it is in relation to the buses and I10.
Whorealdo appeared to be on some type of mood altercating substances.
OTOH, I too have been disappointed, even sickened, by those who have taken these extreme measures that the news media seem to find. I hope and pray that I would behave more honorably if in the same situation.
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.
Exactly!!
Carolyn
Five thousand hungry people standing on a bridge surrounded by water and not one of them has a fishing pole.
Thanks for reposting this article. I was contemplating doing it myself. The original post can be found at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1476662/posts
There seems to be a definite lack of criticism of the State and local governments. It's all Bush's fault--no, it's your local government's fault first and foremost. For all those that take welfare, now there's work for you to do to earn the $$ you take every month. They can get off their, in some cases, big butts and go to work. They have enough energy to rape, loot, and murder. In fact, they can come out of the dark ages and move into the 21st century.
Some Texans have called into talk shows and said that the "crime" has already started to rise.
---Whorealdo appeared to be on some type of mood altercating substances.---
Whorealdo! That's not the mike! You're talking into the baby"s head!
Whorealdo should be within a 100 yards of babies, small dogs and cats and old people.
Whorealdo should be within a 100 yards of babies, small dogs and cats and old people.
Whorealdo should be within a 100 yards of babies, small dogs and cats and old people.
Whorealdo shouldn't be allowed to be within a 100 yards of babies, small dogs and cats and old people.
bump for a later read
Excellent piece. Period.
It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
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 one 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
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.
They don't know what a history book is!
Part of the article: People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Thanks Governor Perry.
Yep, what we are seeing from New Orleans is Lyndon Johnson's Great(gag)Society in full flower. I'm afraid that New Orleans won't be the end of it ,either. America is coming apart at the seams, thanks to generations of conditioning(or call it brainwashing) by the government,media and academia. It will get to the point we will have to give the country a new name: Moronica.
Yep, what we are seeing from New Orleans is Lyndon Johnson's Great(gag)Society in full flower. I'm afraid that New Orleans won't be the end of it ,either. America is coming apart at the seams, thanks to generations of conditioning(or call it brainwashing) by the government,media and academia. It will get to the point we will have to give the country a new name: Moronica.
you do wonder how quickly the Astrodome will become a cesspool, and how quickly crime will rise in Houston.
This will be the next big story of the disaster. All these cities that have risen to the occasion to provide humanitarian relief will get a fine thank you for their efforts- tens of thousands more added to their welfare rolls, burdening their already taxed public schools and more crime. How long do think these people will be happy to sit in domes and shelters day after day, week after week knowing they have nothing and have no home to even go to. They will start to yell that they are not being treated well enough, the food isn't good enough, they haven't gotten their checks, etc... And above all, where are they all going to GO without any means or skills to assimilate back into their communities? I'm telling you, it's going to get ugly- FAST.
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.
BTTT!!!!
Thanks for posting. Excellent analysis of what happened.
Funny you don't see the same whiners in the other two States where the damage may be even worse than in NO. We had four (4) hurricanes in our State last year, did we see any whiners from the local officials? NO!
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