So I'm looking back at this diary I wrote in the aftermath of Katrina, and thinking about both the London riots and the Flash Mob violence in some cities in the U.S.. I'm not so much thinking about the rioters as the rest of us, though. How the media and many people have reacted to the disadvantaged and those in dire straits hasn't changed a bit.
Out of frustration and human empathy, I posted a video to my YouTube channel that was an attempt to advise against violence, and possible constructive action. While you might feel it was overly idealistic, I feel that spending ten minutes possibly getting even one rioter to pause and think "maybe burning stuff, especially in my own neighborhood, isn't such a hot idea" is a worthy use of my time.
Here is the video:
Click through and look at the comments if you have the time - most of them are positive, but the very real thread of racism running through some of them is eerily reminiscent of this iconic pair of photographs.
While the rioters/flash mob members are not contending with a natural disaster, they are living under a system that places limits on their lives just as implacably, and is just as amenable to being resisted - except that a hurricane won't bemoan a culture of looting and scold your parents the way Prime Minister Cameron or Mayor Nutter has. That they can say these words with absolutely no attention paid to the role that placing the poor so far down on our list of priorities might have had would have astonished me when I was twenty, but now just makes me coldly angry.
So what's the point? Short and sweet, it is certainly immoral to riot and loot, modified by whether you are attempting to loot in order to survive. Those who have been looting the world's economies, thereby destroying jobs, allowing infrastructure to erode (enabling natural disasters and more pervasive health problems), and razing neighborhoods while enriching themselves are the worst kind of looters. We will continue to see the poor in dire straits for as long as we allow them to do so.