Looting is an expression of blind rage – I judge what inspired the looting far more harshly than the looting itself.
The looting in Baltimore starts with police killing young black men and will end when police stop killing young black men. This anger that self mutilates their own community is the same seething fury at injustice it always is and yet we still fail to connect the dots.
People are rioting in Baltimore because they are furious. America has a Police force that is utterly out of control. Their self important belief that might equals right has led to a militarisation of a domestic police force with all the same arrogance as an occupying Army.
Riots are a symptom.
The people that truly care for the injustice are not the ones looting, but people who were peacefully protesting, because they know a riot will do no good. The rioters are opportunists, thugs and violent criminals, who care nothing for their community or city.
Condemning them is easy, Mitch. I think I read somewhere that a third of all black people in Baltimore live in poverty.Yes most people want to protest in peace and find violence repugnant. That is your position and, up to a point, mine as well, but if you live in poverty and have done so perhaps for decades; and if your first line encounter with those who rule Baltimore is a violent thuggish police force which brutalises them and kills at random without remorse, you are going to see them and the ‘rulers’ as an enemy for which you can only feel hatred. You will not see anything wrong in looting shops; you will see it as a chance to exact revenge on a city that excludes you. These people whom you condemn,Mitch, are the end product of the society that represses them.
It is easy to condemn from the safety of a ‘relatively’ benign society; if you were there and had not had a nutrious meal for weeks, you might think differently.
RE: “Looting is an expression of blind rage”.
I might agree that riots, in extreme cases, might be expressions of blind rage. But I could never agree the same could be said for looting, since it is targeted and evidently requires good vision, hardly blind anything. I might go along with your expression if people were as likely to run off with toilet brushes and soft furnishings, but the ones I see on TV seem to be loaded up with TVs and mobile phones.
It’s a fine balance of ‘policing by consent’ correlated with a compliant society, on the same continuum to ‘policing by imposition’ correlated with a seething society.
On the one end you need only minimal police to enforce the law, on the other you need lots of police to enforce a semblance of civility.
I have no answers.
Looting is blind greed.
Nothing to do with rage.
So why don’t the comfortable middle class riot?
They have better things to do
Consume, consume, consume…
1. They think it is morally wrong.
2. They respect other people’s property.
3. They don’t think a TV is worth risking getting arrested over.
4. They actually aren’t as greedy as you think they are.
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