Friday, September 09, 2005
PASSING THE BLAME
There are a lot of stories going around about who or what is to blame for NOLA. On talk radio this afternoon someone said that the Governor of Louisiana decided not to send food and water to the Superdome because she didn't want people to stay there. If that is true, how does anyone make sense of it.
It looks as though Brown may be looking for another job. Nagin has come under fire. Bush's approval ratings are the lowest since Nixon.
The following explanation for the chaos in NO is one that hasn't been making the rounds, though I did see it a few days ago somewhere. A reader sent it in this afternoon.
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.
It doesn't mention drugs, but one news report indicated that the search for a fix was behind the hospital break-ins.
The failure of the welfare state is no secret, but the intentions that prompted it were positive.
I guess the question this article brings up is how do you help the poor without turning them into dependents?
