Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

What I find most disturbing about the disaster in New Orleans is the pervasive lack of self-reliance. It isn't like floods along the Mississippi River are a rare occurrence. But in past floods, the traditional first response of the threatened local population has been to grab shovels, buckets, building debris, arm loads of rocks, whatever was at hand, and head for the breach in the levee. The first priority was recognized to be the need to stop further flooding and damage as quickly as possible. Nothing else was more important than to restore the levees since no other recovery effort could even begin until the expanding flooding was stopped. Those who were unable to directly participate in the effort to fix the levees formed support systems providing food, water, etc., out of recognition of their shared interest in the work being done.

The flooding of New Orleans didn't happen immediately - it took days for the water flowing through the breaches in the levees to fill the city. There were an estimated 100,000 people in the city who couldn't flee. But instead of acting in their own enlightened self-interest, they did essentially nothing but sit in their homes watching the water level rise, waiting for outsiders to come from thousands of miles away to rescue them. No effort to plug the breaches in the levees was attempted until the Army Corp of Engineers belatedly flew in helicopters and started dropping concrete blocks and sand bags into the ever widening gaps. By then most of the damage to the city had already occurred, and the unchecked flow of water through the initial breaches had greatly increased the damage to the levees.

Consider what 100,000 poorly equip-ped Chinese peasants could have accomplished in this situation with just their bare hands, sticks and scraps of wood to use as shovels, and baskets and buckets to manually haul rocks and dirt.

The non-reaction of the residents of New Orleans isn't by any means unique - it's symptomatic of the increasingly pervasive abdication of self-reliance in our whole society. Intrusive government is increasingly expected to take responsibility for all planning for, and response to, local emergencies. Government law enforcement officers are expected to maintain order and mutual respect within a population that now considers itself empowered to do anything that appears to be in its short term individual advantage that the police aren't capable of stopping them from doing. And even when their wanton destruction of the remnants of civilization is temporarily obstructed, there is no expectation of personal accountability for their crimes. In fact, their violations of the most basic principles of civilized behavior are aggressively justified by a chorus of victim-empowerment advocates.

In past emergencies, individual citizens capable of recognizing that life would continue after the immediate moment, imposed a sense of order and shared interests among the victims of a disaster. While it wasn't by any means a perfect solution, the disorganized militia - as in every able bodied citizen - considered itself the defenders of the victims, those who had been spared direct harm, and the social contract. Localized looting might occur but it tended to be quickly suppressed by armed citizens defending their own and their neighbor's property. On the other hand, those who could, tended to give all they could to help their neighbors who had suffered losses or physical harm, knowing that it was in their own long term self-interest to mitigate the effects of the disaster as much and as quickly as possible. They didn't have to fear that their own property would be looted while they were away providing support to the victims of the disaster, or to those working on tasks like restoring the levees. They could open their homes to refugees without fear that they would later regret their generosity.

This emergency was different, and a lot of citizens paid a very high price for that difference.

Instead of the citizens individually and collectively responding to the emergency and the needs of their neighbors, facilitated in some measure by their government, this time government seized total control over all aspects of the emergency, even to the point of aggressively prohibiting private citizens from actively participating. The arrogant interference of government agencies in the rights and duties of the citizens vastly increased the pain and suffering of the very citizens those agencies were supposed to be serving.

The damage and death toll directly caused by the hurricane was insignificant compared to the catastrophe caused by the slow motion flooding of the city resulting from the failure to immediately repair the breaches in the levees. Instead of focusing all available resources on repairing the levees in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, government agents instead focused on herding the remaining population into makeshift containment pens. Instead of supporting the efforts of the citizens to deal with the ongoing disaster threatening their lives and property, government agents did everything in their power to keep citizens from participating in any effort to stop the ongoing destruction of their city.

Adding to the unnecessary destruction caused by the flooding was the senseless destruction caused by looters and vandals during the government enforced breakdown of the social contract. Even while government agents were effectively incarcerating legitimate citizens in the surrogate hellhole prisons of the Superdome and convention center, they were opening the cells of the real prisons, letting the real criminals loose on the unprotected city. Adding to the violence were feral gangs of young male sociopaths from various welfare housing projects, the vicious products of generations of government "entitlement" programs that had stripped them of any sense of involvement in the social contract.

The police stood by and watched as criminals looted the property of those who had obeyed the evacuation orders - including gun shops. But they aggressively seized the lawful firearms of citizens just when the constitutional right to bear arms was most clearly needed by those citizens to protect themselves and their property from the violent dangers government agents had created in their communities.

After sending heavily armed agents to seize the weapons possessed by lawful citizens, the ruling elite brought in private mercenaries hired from private security companies such as Blackwater to terrorize the now defenseless citizens. While private citizens have been arbitrarily deprived of their constitutional right to bear arms, heavily armed private mercenary armies now openly carry fully automatic weapons. While the legitimate citizens have been arrogantly deprived of their most basic rights of self-defense, the private mercenaries have been granted authority to employ lethal force against anyone who dares to get in their way.

Even as they were failing to do the job themselves, government agents arrogantly obstructed the efforts of private citizens and businesses to provide aid to the disaster victims. Truckloads of critically needed supplies were delayed or even turned away at government roadblocks set up around the stricken city. Hundreds of highly qualified volunteers spent long days idly waiting for bureaucratic approval to apply their desperately needed skills to the evolving disaster.

The water flooding New Orleans became contaminated with sewage, industrial chemicals, petrochemicals from sunken vehicles, organic toxins from dead bodies and flooded graveyards, etc. In addition to the water damage, there will now be widespread toxic contamination and biological health risks. Buildings that only suffered a few broken windows and missing roof shingles during the hurricane, will now have to be razed due to toxic contamination that has soaked into their structure.

Having incompetently allowed the city to flood, the government bureaucracy is now determined to pump the flood waters out of the ruined city as quickly as possible. Pumping the evil brew out into the gulf without removing the contaminants may well cause substantial long term damage to the seafood and other industries that depend on the gulf environment.

After forcibly removing citizens from their property, the government is now using armed force to deny citizens the right to return to their property until government officials grant them permission. And even when permission is grudgingly granted, citizens are finding that their access to their property is often strictly limited in the time and scope of what they are allowed to do. These arbitrary delays are guaranteed to result in greatly increased damage to the citizens' property due to the government enforced neglect of the original damage caused by natural forces.

None of these post-hurricane human-caused disasters would have occurred if there had been a rational coherent traditional response to the flooding immediately after the hurricane passed.

The only area in which government demonstrated extraordinary enthusiasm was in exploiting the emergency as a means to increase its power to infringe on the rights of citizens. Government agents in effect claimed ownership and control over the disaster, as if everything and everyone affected by the disaster became the property of the government agencies supposedly supplying aid and emergency services to disaster victims.

When the core of mutual respect and shared self-interest is replaced by reliance on authoritarian government, the citizens are deprived of a most important dynamic - the recognition that it remains in each individual's self-interest to maintain the social contract even when the physical presence of authority there isn't there to enforce it. In New Orleans, this critical dynamic was broken by a combination of long term subversion of self-reliant individualism by the welfare state, and short term abuses of authoritarian power. The tragic result was a far worse disaster than the initial damage caused by the hurricane.

The most obvious lesson from the New Orleans disaster should be that dependence on government is a fool's errand. Government agencies utterly failed to prevent the disaster, prepare for the disaster, or effectively respond to the disaster. It can be argued that the involvement of incompetent government agents caused far more harm than good by first preempting and then directly obstructing efforts by private citizens - both local residents and outsiders wanting to help.

Far from confirmation that more government is needed, the abysmal performance of government in every aspect demonstrates that citizens can only depend on themselves, their neighbors, and the compassionate assistance of their fellow citizens - in that order - to protect against, and respond to emergencies. The involvement of government invariably increases the suffering and the magnitude of the damage that will occur.