[edited for clarity]
The looting of New Orleans has held a strange fascination for me.
When I was a kid, the Los Angeles riots happened about a dozen miles away from my home. I remember it completely consuming us. We watched it on television, we all bought newspapers, and our teachers at school suspended lessons and put the radio on or took us into another classroom with a television.
The adults around me seemed gleeful. I may be remembering it wrong, but the riots lasted a few days, and more than anything, I remember the adults feeling happy that it was happening. They said the opposite, "Oh, how terrible. I can't believe what's happening," but they were all unmistakably excited.
A lot of people talked about defending their homes from the looters. Some people jokingly talked about what they would get from Circuit City if our community was enveloped in looting as well. Others talked about driving to South Central and wanting to see it for themselves.
So as a kid, I got to see a lot of adults behaving like assholes. One of my friends' dads stayed up all night with his handguns watching the street for trouble. It was fucking weird.
It seems to me that the looting, robbing, and stream of refugees is almost normal. It's almost to be expected when a whole city is destroyed and most people have been evacuated.
I re-read a science fiction book a couple weeks ago called Parable of the Sower written by Octavia E. Butler. And in this book, the protagonist was living in an America maybe fifty years in the future where there was a complete breakdown of authority, because of one economic depression after another, clean water cost more than food and small groups of houses built walls of glass, razor wire, and mud around them to keep out the scavengers. Nobody went outside the walls if they could help it, and work that paid in money was scarce.
The writing sometimes wasn't good in that book. Certain situations and conversations felt contrived, but overall, she did a great job of portraying the desperation of the situation quite well. These people had lived with that desperation and had grown used to it. It felt like something that could happen to us if things went a little differently.
So here's where I'm going with this: I can see all the highschool gangster-wannabe kids becoming dangerous predators in a disaster situation. That's easy. But the real question is, at what point do normal people start acting like predators themselves?
How long does it take before a normal person gets hungry or scared enough to start looting people's abandoned houses? How long after that point before these normal people progress to robbing other people directly for their clean water and food?
The looting of New Orleans has held a strange fascination for me.
When I was a kid, the Los Angeles riots happened about a dozen miles away from my home. I remember it completely consuming us. We watched it on television, we all bought newspapers, and our teachers at school suspended lessons and put the radio on or took us into another classroom with a television.
The adults around me seemed gleeful. I may be remembering it wrong, but the riots lasted a few days, and more than anything, I remember the adults feeling happy that it was happening. They said the opposite, "Oh, how terrible. I can't believe what's happening," but they were all unmistakably excited.
A lot of people talked about defending their homes from the looters. Some people jokingly talked about what they would get from Circuit City if our community was enveloped in looting as well. Others talked about driving to South Central and wanting to see it for themselves.
So as a kid, I got to see a lot of adults behaving like assholes. One of my friends' dads stayed up all night with his handguns watching the street for trouble. It was fucking weird.
It seems to me that the looting, robbing, and stream of refugees is almost normal. It's almost to be expected when a whole city is destroyed and most people have been evacuated.
I re-read a science fiction book a couple weeks ago called Parable of the Sower written by Octavia E. Butler. And in this book, the protagonist was living in an America maybe fifty years in the future where there was a complete breakdown of authority, because of one economic depression after another, clean water cost more than food and small groups of houses built walls of glass, razor wire, and mud around them to keep out the scavengers. Nobody went outside the walls if they could help it, and work that paid in money was scarce.
The writing sometimes wasn't good in that book. Certain situations and conversations felt contrived, but overall, she did a great job of portraying the desperation of the situation quite well. These people had lived with that desperation and had grown used to it. It felt like something that could happen to us if things went a little differently.
So here's where I'm going with this: I can see all the highschool gangster-wannabe kids becoming dangerous predators in a disaster situation. That's easy. But the real question is, at what point do normal people start acting like predators themselves?
How long does it take before a normal person gets hungry or scared enough to start looting people's abandoned houses? How long after that point before these normal people progress to robbing other people directly for their clean water and food?
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From BBC News today:
US troops, armed with a shoot-to-kill policy, are being sent to New Orleans to quell growing lawlessness, four days after Hurricane Katrina hit.