Interesting Insight To The Katrina Disaster....

Why was it necessary to send in the National Guard to restore order after the hurricane that hit New Orleans? Usually, there are heroic efforts by ordinary people saving lives and helping others. But instead there are tales of rape, robbery and murder. Battle hardened Arkansas National Guard troops entered the city with orders to shoot to kill lawless bands of roving criminals.

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).

This person blames the deterioration in the aftermath of the hurricane on several factors, one being the inadequate planning of local and state governments to evacuate certain groups of people including jailed criminals that were released from prison to fend for themselves. The people that weren't evacuated included the poorest, least educated and socially dependent welfare recipients that were least likely to cope in this situation.

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.