[Shotimes] OT: Katrina Part 2

[Kevin & Cheryl Airth]

      " '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 Technology, 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.