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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Why does everybody insist on calling the displaced
people in the South ( refugees), their AMERICANS driven from their homes by
a storm...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dave</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net href="mailto:gcfl-discuss@gcfl.net">Discussion
of the Good, Clean Funnies List</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=sdmheit@verizon.net
href="mailto:sdmheit@verizon.net">Shirley Heit</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, September 09, 2005 7:50
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [GCFL-discuss] A different
perspective on Katrina</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080 size=2>
<DIV>This makes you wonder. Now I'm not denying there are many people
who need help. I just wonder. Frank</DIV></FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080
size=2></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#000080 size=2>POINT OF VIEW<BR
class=Apple-interchange-newline></DIV></FONT></STRONG><FONT id=role_document
face="Arial Baltic" color=#0000ff size=3>
<DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000cc><STRONG>This may be a point of view on Hurricane
Katrina that is hard to swallow but there are some valid an interesting points
worth considering.</STRONG></FONT></DIV><STRONG><FONT color=#0000cc></FONT>
<DIV><BR>by Robert Tracinski <BR>Sep 02, 2005 <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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<BR>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. <BR><BR>Public officials did not expect that the first thing they
would have to do i s 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. <BR><BR>But this is not a natural
disaster. It is a man-made disaster. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>The man made disaster is the welfare state.
<BR><BR>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, t hey 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. <BR><BR>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). <BR><BR>So what explains the chaos in New Orleans? <BR><BR>To
give you an idea of the m agnitude of what is going on, here is a description
from a Washington Times story: <BR><BR>"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. <BR><BR>"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as
National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting,
carjackings and gunfire.... <BR><BR>"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux
Blanco said 300 Iraq hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New
Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders. <BR><BR>" '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.' " <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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?
<BR><BR>Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
<BR><BR>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.) <BR><BR>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<BR>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.<BR>[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.] <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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 corrupte d 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.
<BR><BR>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.
<BR><BR>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 th em. 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. <BR><BR>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.
<BR><BR>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 sum mary of the 40-year history
of the welfare state and its public housing projects. <BR><BR>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. </DIV>
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<HR SIZE=1>
<A href="http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/">Click here to donate to the
Hurricane Katrina relief effort.</A>
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