Thomas Hobbes, call your office.

New Orleans Mayor Finally Vows to Stop Looting

(CNSNews.com) - Mayor Ray Nagin on Wednesday night ordered 1,500 police to stop the looting that has gone on for two days and become increasingly violent, press reports said. "They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas -- hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said in a statement to The Associated Press. The images of looting in New Orleans have disappointed many Americans and come to symbolize the anarchy in a devastated city that seems to be unprepared for the magnitude of the disaster that hit it. The looting of consumer goods that have no bearing on survival has gone on in full view of outnumbered police and TV cameras.


Making Excuses for Looting? 'Opportunity for Class Warfare'

We fear the anarchy, the feral fanaticism and, at the heart of it, the primeval bugbear of someone coming after our homes, our stores, our stuff.

To follow the news on television the past couple of days, looters have pretty much taken over the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "The fear, of course," said talk show host Tucker Carlson, who is less breathy and sensationalist than most, "is that looting contributes to the sense that things are out of control, and that lawlessness begins to snowball, and that stealing becomes murder."

It's among the scariest and nastiest of nightmares. One person breaks a store window, others seem to gain courage and storm the establishment. In the popular mind, we are watching mob psychology in dangerous action.
But, as we are also learning from the post-Katrina chaos, what we think of as looting may be more complicated than it seems.

Benigno E. Aguirre of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has been watching and reading about looters in Louisiana. "It may look from the outside as if they are stealing or breaking the law," says Aguirre, "when in fact some of them are trying to survive."

On the other hand, he says, some of the thieves are garden-variety crooks. "There is always a very small number of people that are predisposed to crime, and they see a disaster as an opportunity to act."

There are the disenfranchised who jump at the chance to get even with those who have more stuff than they do. "Disasters can become opportunity for class warfare, and that kind of appropriation of other people's property should be prosecuted," he says,
There are looters, he says, but "people use the concept of looting without making distinctions."

Many may be people taking drastic measures required by drastic times. And some, he says, are the in-an-emergency equivalent of hunters/gatherers, foraging for food, fresh water, medicine, matches, batteries, everyday essentials that are just not available. Not at home, not at shelters. (Thanks to CNSNews for the heads up.)