Its been a little more than a week since Hurricane Katrina hit the shores of the Gulf Coast, and already the blame game is beginning. Before its over, there will be plenty of evidence to indict Michael Brown, Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco, and perhaps others. Before we start pointing, the finger of blame, however, maybe we need to look in the mirror.
As this editorial in today’s Washington Times points out, the person most responsible for our personal safety is ourselves.
But it is not only government officials who have responsibilities. Private citizens have a personal responsibility to be both law-abiding and self-reliant.
Before a government was formed to provide for the general welfare, self-reliant Americans fought a revolution with their own blood, sweat and tears rather than put their lives and fortunes in the grip of others.
Since then, we have been blessed by waves of self-reliant immigrants who took their fates in their own hands and struggled their way to America — most of them legally.
Down through our history, through wars, floods, pioneering and
depressions, Americans have cherished the responsibility to fend for themselves rather than wait for authorities to take care of them, to instruct them in how to take care of themselves.
We’ve seen this self-reliance throughout our history. From the first settlers on our shores, to the pioneers who headed out west, to the 20-somethings who moved to Silicon Valley and started a technology revolution. Its one of the great things about America, its also something that many of people who stayed behind in New Orleans seemed to have lacked.
In assessing the events on our Gulf Coast over the past fortnight it is necessary to note that thousands of Americans in News Orleans showed almost no sense of self-reliance and personal responsibility. Some, of course, were sick, infirm or otherwise helpless. But many were not. This malfeasance of citizenship is as damaging as the failures of government officials, and rectification is just as crucial.
It is worth noting, as Michael Novak has shrewdly observed, that a majority of the 80 percent of the citizens of New Orleans who took personal responsibility for getting themselves out of New Orleans before the certain danger were African American. Few were rich. Many were surely poor.
(….)
To their shame, thousands of New Orleans residents who don’t deserve the honor of being called citizens utterly failed to show personal responsibility. They heeded neither common sense nor a respect for their own human dignity, nor the warnings of government, to move out of danger’s path.
These are harsh words, but they need to be said. If the government, the media, and everyone around is saying leave town and you have the means to do so, then you need to leave town by any means necessary. Yes, the government in New Orleans did fail its frail and infirm citizens — a failure highlighted by the sight of 200 school buses sitting under water, but too many people seem to have failed themselves, either because they were too stupid to save themselves or because they thought someone else would save them.
As for why this happened, the editors at the Times come up with the best answer I can think of:
How did so many Americans come to such a degraded condition? And what is to be done about it? This is not a matter of race, or class, or innate intelligence. It is largely the product of a mental state of dependency induced by deliberate government policy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt knew and feared the debilitating effect of putting a man on a dole. So he put millions of hungry, jobless Americans to work building roads, bridges, national park facilities –and character. Many of those young WPA men went on to demonstrate their self-reliance and dignity carrying rifles on distant battlefields only a few years later. Many of those young women went on to be the human force in our arsenals of democracy.
Yet today, the remnants of the liberal welfare state continue to subsidize the degrading human condition of giving the down and out a check without demanding in return the personal responsibilities that develop self-reliance
The fall of the City of New Orleans is the result of the culture of dependency.
Technorati Tag: Hurricane Katrina
