Yeah, but what are they going to do? Shoot themselves???
Posted on 09/01/2005 5:09:57 PM PDT by wesley_windam-price
First the hurricane, then the looting.
Photographs and videos show triumphant, smiling scavengers brazenly hauling away everything from food to TVs from ransacked stores.
The images are troubling on many levels: Human behavior at its most desperate. Hordes of people, often of color, stranded with no options. People in a situation we can't fathom behaving in ways we condemn from afar.
But disaster-response researchers are intrigued, especially because this behavior has been far from the norm. Sociologists cite more than 50 years of research showing that widespread looting after a natural disaster is rare.
They cite Hurricane Hugo, the 1989 storm that sliced a massive path of destruction through locations including St. Croix, Puerto Rico, Charleston, S.C., and Charlotte, N.C.
But major looting occurred only in St. Croix, said Kathleen Tierney, sociology professor and director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Researchers later determined that St. Croix differed in several ways from the other areas.
"More than 80 percent of the housing was destroyed," Tierney said. "It's an island; there was nowhere to go. They didn't know when help was going to come. Law enforcement was rendered ineffective. They didn't know when they'd see another meal."
Sounds close to the situation in New Orleans.
Still, images repeated in video loops on 24-hour cable-news networks raise stereotypes. That struck Robert Smith, political-science professor at San Francisco State University. "All the people that appear to be in distress ... have been African American, people coming from the [housing] projects," he said. "All the looters that have been shown are black."
Smith said he's not surprised. He said the neglected people in those communities — those stranded without resources — often are black. But he added that the pictures and footage of the looting "will reinforce the image of black people as criminals."
The population of New Orleans is about 67 percent African American, the fifth-largest percentage among American cities with more than 100,000 population.
Ronald Walters sees "a global issue."
"Black people are no different than any other group of people in the world," said Walters, political-science professor and director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland at College Park. "Explaining [the looting], you have to go far, far beyond skin color."
Walters said any group — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever — would do anything necessary to survive when faced with tragic circumstances, including raiding stores for supplies.
Sociology professor Henry Fischer agreed. He has long studied human response to disasters as head of the Center for Disaster Research and Education at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
But what about the looting of luxury items? Some media images showed people hauling off television sets and DVD players, in an area with no electricity. "That's something we as researchers are going to take a closer look at," he said.
He offered a hypothesis — not an excuse, he stressed: "You'd probably find the people doing this to be very poor. Pretty much they have nothing in their lives. They didn't have the resources to escape, didn't have a car or money to leave.
"Now, on this one occasion, suddenly they think, 'Wow, I can have these things,' for once."
Much of what's being taken are essentials: anything edible, disposable diapers, water and clothes.
"That is the behavior people take under the pressure of survival," said Benigno Aguirre, professor in the department of sociology and criminal justice and the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware in Newark. "This is misconstrued as looting, as thievery."
In disaster, social norms shift, sociologists say. What may be considered criminal or unacceptable under ordinary circumstances becomes reasonable.
"Expectations and social agreements can be suspended ... because the situation is so dire," said Barbara Feldman, associate sociology professor at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.
Observers say it's important to note that most people are behaving.
"The looters are a tiny slither of humanity," said Sheldon Solomon, psychology professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "Most of the folks in and around New Orleans appear to be showing humanity at our best — helpful, honest and genuinely concerned about the welfare of others."
Many of these "people" weren't civilized BEFORE the hurricane hit.
This sounds like the same post 9/11 drivel of trying to understand why the terrorists hate us. They just do! Accept it and move on. These people are the dregs of society. That's why they do it.
Fat, mean and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Easy answer. They are inner city residents, mainly black, who have been told that they "deserve" whatever they can get by the liberals for so lon that they believe that they are entitled to steal.
The story I heard was that they were all loaded onto a barge and moved. They showed a photo. Of course, that might have just been one jail, or they may have changed their mind afterward and let them go.
If so, then the authorities should be hanged.
Wonder how many of the floating corpses will be voting demonRAT in the next elections?
to quote Al Pacino--"what a crock of s^%t
This will set Civil Rights back about 100 years....perhaps going all the way back to the Emincipation Proclomation...
You know, there's a terrible joke about the democrats in this mess somewhere.....
Some law enforcement officials have stated that some people deliberately stayed behind for a chance to loot if the opportunity arose. It did, and of course, they did. The same thing happened during the LA riots in the 1990s; the LAPD predicted it before the jury acquitted those white cops in the Rodney King case. A similar prediction could have been made in N.O. But anyone making that prediction would have been labeled a racist. Now, four days into the looting, few Louisiana politicians seem to be willing to refer to the looters as criminals...
Fox said they let them all go loose in the city.
Amen, brother! My own very wonderful daddy pointed out that cultures won't survive without dads. I called him on it, thinking he was exaggerating, but as usual, ol' Pop was right on the money. A culture without dads is a culture with gangs, and young males in gangs notoriously die young. I'll bet that a very high percentage of these violent looters come from fatherless homes. We know for sure that most of the guys in prison came from fatherless homes.
As for a popular culture that celebrates this in some quarters ... my gosh, our whole American society deifies single motherhood!! A single mom is sacred, she can do no wrong, she is always to be dealt with with the utmost compassion, she is always the victim, while the fathers are chastized for being irresponsible: "If they weren't willing to be 'real' dads, then they shouldn't have fathered the child!" My response: what about the mom's responsibility? Isn't she just as irresponsible when she gets knocked-up by an abusive or neglegtful guy and then decides to keep the baby rather than give it up for adoption?
But the WORST is that our society makes it so, so easy for moms to divorce dads for any reason at all. Dad can have been faithful, never abused drugs, never been physically abusive, but if mom gets bored or decides she wants to "find herself," she files for divorce, gets physical custody of the kids, and dad -- or ex-dad -- gets the bill, and gets to see his kids four days a month and some holidays. I think a lot of the malaise we see in our society today -- anger, violent lyrics in music that denigrate women, lack of civility, entitlement mentalities, and a lot more, are caused in great part to the fact that our society minimizes fathers' roles in the lives of kids, and makes single motherhood easy and even honorable!!!
Reagan said that conservatives had simple solutions to complex problems -- not EASY solutions, but simple ones. I think that a concerted effort to discourage single motherhood and encourage marriage and heavy involvement of dads in the raising of their children (as opposed to being simply sources of financial child support) is one of them.
End rant!!!
I saw my story on Fox, too. In the one I saw, they said they moved them via a barge. They showed a picture of a bunch of guys wearing orange jump suits, leaning over the rail of a barge.
If it meant the survival of my family, I would take food from one of those grocery stores. But I would make a point of returning and repaying the owner (assuming he survived the storm).
But he added that the pictures and footage of the looting "will reinforce the image of black people as criminals." YEPPER!!!!!!!!!!
We have to stop pussyfooting with this culture anbd excusing it and treat it like it merits
like it's wrong....for everyone and should be scorned rather than celebrated and mimicked.
Yeah, but what are they going to do? Shoot themselves???
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