Barely 24 hours after Chile was struck by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, reports of “looting” began airing on television news.
If you happened to be listening and not watching, you might have imagined hordes of lawless miscreants running through the streets with rolled-up carpets and flat-screen TVs. But if you were watching, what you saw was people in a grocery store scrambling for food and water.
Last evening, we began hearing stories of “looters clashing with police,” and this morning, reports of “looters” being shot. It happened after the earthquake in Haiti. It happened after hurricane Katrina. It always happens when disaster leads to chaos and authority struggles to maintain some sense of order.
There is, however, a distinction that I think we too often fail to make between helping yourself to a new microwave oven because there’s no one to stop you, and stealing food to stay alive. The former is a crime by any measure and when it comes to consequences, well, good luck. The later may also be illegal, but under the circumstances can hardly be separated from the instinct to survive.
We can take the position that those left with no option but to steal are responsible for their plight by virtue of not being prepared, knowing full well that many families will — at any point in time and for any number of reasons — lack the stockpiles to sustain themselves until emergency food and water arrive. We also know that in times of societal stress, law enforcement is more likely to dispense “justice” on the spot rather than follow the usual legal procedures.
Regardless of how the situation comes to be, we cannot avoid this stark moral question: in a crisis, is it proper to condemn a person to death for attempting to survive? If the answer is yes, we need also ask whether we will feel the same when the crisis is over — and whether we’d feel the same if our families were the ones in peril.
Alternatively, we might be inclined to simply stand by and allow people to take whatever they could carry, setting aside the property rights of the merchant, and knowing that distribution by such means is guaranteed to be inequitable, chaotic at a time when we should be striving for calm, and downright dangerous.
To the extent that I can imagine myself faced with a family in need, with banks closed, credit cards useless, and not knowing when emergency relief might arrive, I’d be one of those raiding the grocery stores. And were I a police officer, I can’t imagine being able to shoot someone for the crime of trying to provide for his or her family. But that’s just me.
Once a crisis occurs, it seems there aren’t any good choices, just bad and worse. But for us to watch these situations play out time after time and not do more to mitigate them in the future is unconscionable.
All of us, in every corner of the world, need to be made aware — and from time to time reminded — how important it is to be able to survive a crisis until emergency relief arrives. For those caught unprepared or who cannot prepare, perhaps stockpiles of non-perishable items could be located not in distant warehouses, but closer to where they will be needed — in churches, schools and civic buildings that can be reached on foot. Perhaps laws might be rewritten so that food markets could be taken over by local authorities in times of emergency, such that owners would be compensated, their properties protected, and food distributed in a less chaotic manner.
While I don’t mean to suggest that I have all the answers, or even very good ones, I do think we can do much better than we have until now.
In the meantime, can we at least stop referring to people stealing food to survive as “looters?”
