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I've been reading this thread and going back and forth on whether to write something. I think Matt Bracken has made some important points that are getting missed and that we need to hear.

Matt, thanks for posting this. We can debate how likely or unlikely a major urban breakdown may be, and many will dismiss your premise. They can't (or at least they shouldn't) dismiss your point of what would happen ***IF*** a major urban breakdown does happen, regardless of what caused it.

The differing experiences of SCalGal and buffaloguy in disasters show an important part of the problem. When flooding happened in the upper reaches of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, or when a tornado struck Joplin, buffaloguy is right that most Midwestern rural and small-town people remained calm and helped each other. However, New Orleans was a wake-up call — that simply isn't going to happen in some of our major urban areas.

I think most Americans who have spent generations living in a First World urban environment have no idea how quickly our own emergency response teams believe things would fall apart in case of a major disaster. Rioting and breakdown of law and order in our cities is expected when the government cannot provide necessary services.

For the moment, let's change Matt's premise to something that has nothing to do with politics so people are less willing to dismiss it.

I may know more than a little bit about plans for a New Madrid Fault earthquake scenario. (Hint: My community is a pre-designated staging area for disaster response.) The worst earthquake ever to hit the United States was not in California but rather in southeast Missouri two centuries ago. Geologists believe we've had two other massive quakes that were as bad or worse around the years 900 and 1400, and unfortunately, because small quakes are rare, we don't even have a very good idea where the fault lines are located.

If another New Madrid quake were to happen today, millions of people in multiple urban areas would be affected. St. Louis, Memphis, and several other second-level urban areas would be destroyed by the initial quake, aftershocks, and subsequent flooding. Seven million people would be homeless. Virtually every bridge crossing the central part of the Mississippi River and the southern part of the Missouri River would be destroyed. Many gas and oil pipelines would be severed, leading not only to local infernos such as what happened with the fires that destroyed San Francisco but also fuel shortages and supply problems all over the Midwest. All Mississippi River barge traffic north of Arkansas would be halted, at least temporarily. We would see urban chaos in St. Louis and Memphis and probably several other areas that would make the New Orleans hurricane response look like a picnic, and economic chaos would last for years in the region and for months on a national level.

Here is some secondary source media coverage and primary source original info on what disaster planners think is a moderate scenario. A moderate quake would be bad enough — a quake like what happened in 1811/1812, or those around the years 1400 or 900, would be far worse. Planning for worst-case scenarios is far more difficult and would involve a need for National Guard and likely federal military response rather than a primarily civilian response.

http://www.lex18.com/news/study-paints-grim-new-madrid-quake-scenario1

https://www.eeri.org/projects/earthquake-scenarios/new-madrid-earthquake-scenarios/

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/poster/2011/20110516.php

Those who want to dismiss Matt Bracken's scenario of what would cause urban chaos cannot dismiss the fact that in a major disaster, no matter what causes it, much of what Bracken warns would happen is going to happen and there's nothing anyone will be able to do about it for several days and possibly for several weeks. If a major disaster hits multiple cities at the same time or spreads to several major cities over a short period of time, the response time will extend from weeks into months, and could escalate to the point that the government loses the ability to bring things under control for a much longer period than that.

Bottom line: He's not talking fantasy. He's talking the reality of what happens when urban infrastructure breaks down. The only question is how long it will take to get help, and things get worse the longer things go on.

338 posted on Wed Sep 05 2012 17:21:49 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Louis Foxwell: “Your facts are not in dispute. What is in dispute is the racist notion that the ghetto will rise up in violence when the gravy train stops. That is outrageously false.” (Post 325): “I am appalled that Freepers can be lulled into this mind set. This is the stock and trade of the democrat party. Theirs is the culture of fear that uses black violence to sell welfare. Welfare is the greatest single enemy of the black culture. It denies the common humanity if its recipients. It denigrates and slanders. It perpetuates itself and demands absolute obedience to its benefactors.”

A full-scale nationwide race war would surprise me greatly. That kind of theorizing belongs on Stormfront, not conservative websites.

I don't see Matt Bracken doing that, but worrying about what would happen with a major urban breakdown is a legitimate concern, and in America's inner city, race will be a major factor in any breakdown.

Louis Foxwell, you've been on Free Republic for a long time. We agree on the tremendous damage that welfare has done to the black community. I agree that a slow dismantling of the welfare state (i.e., welfare to workfare) can and has worked when it has been tried. The question is whether our economy has gotten so bad that the end of the welfare state will be a quick collapse rather than a planned phase-out, and what would happen in the event of a quick collapse.

Economic collapses have happened before which have made pre-existing bigotry much worse. Look at the Great Depression in the United States and how competition for scarce jobs exacerbated ethnic and racial problems. Look at the Weimar Republic in Germany and how Jews were made scapegoats. It is not unrealistic to ask what will happen if we can't get our own economy under control.

I hope you're right that a rapid collapse of the welfare state won't lead to violence; I hope even more that we never need to find out because we're able to have a slow transition process.

There is some evidence you are right and some that you're wrong.

I'm white. My wife is Korean. I've lived in inner-city communities, both black and Hispanic. I've served in what was once a white church in an inner-city neighborhood that successfully made the transition to become predominantly black, reflecting the makeup of the community. Matt Bracken is absolutely right about skin color becoming an identifier of a potential target and I know firsthand what it means to be identified as a target because of my skin color.

However, let's not paint urban minorities as evil. Especially, let's not underestimate the ability of responsible leaders within urban minority communities to organize their own groups trying to stop violence.

Let's look to history.

In Mayor Daley's Chicago during the riots of the 1960s, neighborhoods generally didn't burn if the Democratic Party's precinct captains reflected the ethnicity of their neighborhoods. Following Martin Luther King's assassination, minority leaders in those neighborhoods went house-to-house saying, “Why burn what we have? That makes no sense.” On the other hand, changing neighborhoods where the precinct captains were older white men hanging onto power by delivering minority voters exploded into race riots because the community structures that Daley relied on to deliver votes fell apart when terrified white residents fled mixed neighborhoods.

Matt will probably say that lack of food is a more powerful motivator of bad behavior than an explosion of rioting because of the shooting of Martin Luther King, and he's right. It will be harder for minority leaders to control the behavior of wild teenage gangs than it was in the 1960s because our nation has gotten worse in many ways over the last half-century.

However, the power of an angry white-haired grandmother in the minority community, or an older man who is a respected community leader (often but not always due to church leadership), is far from being irrelevant.

Such people can't prevent “wilding” by young gangs, but they can respond to outbreaks once they start, and some of those responses can be effective in ways that people outside the community cannot be.

However, having major social consequences in our urban areas if our government welfare system falls apart would not surprise me at all. That is especially true if a collapse of the welfare system comes following a major economic shock caused by a natural disaster beyond the government's ability to promptly repair.

Today, that's not going to happen. Our economy can take a major blow, get up, and start hobbling around. It won't be pretty but the bills will still be paid.

Five or ten years from now, I'm not so sure.