Couldn't have said it better...

The Intellectual Activist has put words to exactly what I had been thinking all day today:

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

I was talking to mom earlier today and mentioned that pickup trucks loaded with people wielding automatic weapons is a common sight in Haiti... and that it shocked me that it had been happening in our own country. But it occurs to me that many Haitians and lifelong welfare recipients in the US have something in common -- the expectation that that everything they get comes from someone else.

I know that saying this isn't going to go over well with my more left-leaning friends, and I don't say it to sound harsh and insensitive. On the contrary, I feel terribly responsible as a collective nation that we have fostered this helpless mentality in so many people by continuing to enslave them to a squalid meager existence provided free of charge.

What I would imagine seeing in, say, my own city of Des Moines in such a natural disaster is that people help one another, provide for one another without hesitation, behave decently, etc... and it saddens me that we're seeing such a different picture in New Orleans. Actually, Des Moines did endure a terrible flood back in 1993, and people took care of one another as best as they could.

I've done a lot of reading about adoption issues in the past eleven years since I became an adoptive parent. One thing I've read about orphaned children, particularly some of the ones from badly-run orphanages in Eastern European countries, is that the "orphanage mentality" comes out in them. They have no opportunity to learn and grown, only to receive -- day after day after day -- and that this environment fosters hoarding, competing, and microcosmic mafiosos among the residents of these facilities.

Is the city of New Orleans just one gigantic orphanage? You know, orphanages were almost always run by charitable groups, even churches... well-meaning groups whose efforts assuaged their guilt AND kept the "riff-raff" from interacting with them at the same time. Not too unlike the liberal left... whose charitable acts always seem to filter through a governmental funnel.

We could say that, instead of orphanages, we should set up a "foster care" system, where people who receive long-term state assistance would be paired up with a guardian family of sorts. But even foster care is a poor substitute for what should've happened, and that's an intact original family that functioned properly and cared for its young responsibly.

We haven't done that. We've just handed out bowls of watery soup to them and warehoused them in bleak concrete housing projects. Is it any wonder they're behaving like animals now? It's how they've been conditioned to respond.

It doesn't mean we don't help in times like this. But it does mean we have a lot of cleaning-up to do afterwards... much more than just cleaning up the physical damage, we must strive to re-establish the cultural foundations of hard work, responsibility and decency. We've failed a couple of generations and I hope it's not too late to rectify this colossal mistake.