Katrina Instant Replay

Or perhaps, that should be "Katrina in Slow-Mo"....

Some time ago, Robert Tracinski made the following excellent point about how Katrina exposed the man-made disaster of the welfare state.

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.

Specifically,

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 [bold added]. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

Two others commented more specifically on this government-promoted inertia. Sid Cammeresi noted after Katrina:

The camera rolls past dozens of people just sitting in the street, doing nothing, waiting for someone to come help them. Another shot shows this angry group of people who are hungry and want food. As they chant something like "WE WANT FOOD!" the camera zooms in on this little girl aged maybe six or seven. The horror! The children are hungry!

We hear on the radio this morning that people are asking, where is FEMA, where is the National Guard, we need food and water....

Similarly, Ron Pisaturo noted:

Every one of these people who stayed behind through his own unwillingness to manage his own life is a villain in this story. Not only did these people endanger their own lives and the lives of their children, but--by overburdening or even deliberately obstructing rescue operations--they got in the way of the rescue of those who actually needed and deserved to be rescued.

When the hurricane had passed, these non-producers were still in the city, and then they complained--with belligerence more appalling than their suffering--that no one was feeding and sheltering them anymore. TV news reporters lamented the "intolerable" conditions for the refugees at the Louisiana Convention Center, and seemed blind to what their own cameras were showing: big, strong men and women, standing around in the streets amidst their own garbage, taking no initiative [bold added],waiting for a bus. For me, a scene that symbolizes the whole situation took place when one of the many obese women yelled accusingly into a reporter's microphone: "I haven't eaten in five days!"

Today, in an installment of a series by the newspaper in the town where I grew up, I saw exactly the same phenomena: people refusing to help themselves (and suffering from the consequences) and news reporters missing or evading some obvious questions.

This article discusses the blight that has overtaken an apartment complex in Jackson, Mississippi, a city that in only twenty years has transformed from a vibrant, growing small city to a poster-child of urban decay.

[Walt] Brooks has a vested interest in the complex not only because he's the maintenance man but also because he's lived there for 15 years.

He said the Jackson Apartments complex he moved into years ago was a very different place.

"When I first moved in here, we had flower beds and everything. Then, people cared about stuff [bold added]. Fifteen years ago, kids weren't as bad, and children (weren't) having children. I raised three kids here."

But now, things are so bad that vacant units have to be boarded up or they'll be vandalized!

To prevent vandalizing of the repaired units, Gibson said she and Brooks have boarded up units until the move-in date.

[Laura] Gibson, who has managed the apartments for three years, said residents of the Jackson Apartments need more social programs.

In previous years, GED classes and parenting classes were offered in an apartment converted into a classroom. She said the response was positive, and the complex had fewer problems.

Gibson said she recently started a Venture Group for teens in the complex. They meet weekly to talk about how to become leaders and how to serve their community.

"I'm trying to introduce them to better things," she said. "Somebody has to push them."

Since [Mayor] Melton's visit, Brooks said the city has not done basic things to show residents they care. That, he said, is another reason why some people don't take pride in where they live.

"The city don't come by and do the sidewalk. I guess we're just second-class citizens over here," he said.

At the Discount Depot gas station and convenience store near the Jackson Apartments, manager Ernest McDonald said he wants to see more businesses in the neighborhood and improved streets, but he said improving the neighborhood is more than tearing down dilapidated buildings.

"What happens to those poor people?"[bold added] he said.

Despite the problems, Brooks keeps on mending, painting and grilling during the summer for area kids. He won't leave, he said.

Left unanswered is whether there were more or fewer "social programs" at the complex fifteen years ago when vacant units weren't being ransacked and "people cared about stuff". I would wager that there were fewer, as is the case with every single rental property I have ever resided in.

And why it is that, "Somebody has to push them" to improve things in this obviously miserable place?

And why can't the teens learn how to sweep or repair the sidewalk from Walt Brooks? Is "caring about stuff" the "stuff" of "second-class citizens"?

And why is basically everyone in this complex doing nothing to improve it -- if not actually making things worse -- while waiting for the city to bail them out?

The question in bold above epitomizes the prevailing attitude towards the poor, which many of them evidently share: that they are not active, responsible participants in their own lives. Until this changes, places like Jackson won't need hurricanes. The people themselves, idle because they have been made able to remain alive without effort on their own behalf, and so existing without meaning or purpose, end up doing nothing at all or acting destructively.

And while the Katrina story and the decline of Jackson are both treated as if race were the major issue, it is the destructive culture of the government-subsidized poor which is the issue, as attested to in part by the fact that Jackson's "white flight" has recently been joined by middle-class "black flight" to the suburbs.

-- CAV