Have you noticed the reference to looters in Haiti?
One news magazine pictured police trying to stop the looting, which, the magazine said, was blessedly under control.
The Denver Post ran a picture showing a Uruguayan soldier with the UN firing in the air to stop the looters from taking aid supplies at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince.
Looters?
The dead bodies are all around.
Tens of thousands are buried in mass graves.
Others bodies, relatives are trying to bury next to the ruins of their homes.
There are not even enough tents for each family. Which means the people are living in the open, and, as one of them put it, eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom in the same place.
Relief is disorganized. No doubt, this is mainly because roads, buildings and personnel have been destroyed.
Then, suddenly, a glimpse of food.
People rush to take it.
Is this looting?
If it is, you might as well call desperate Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto who figured out how to take a fruit here, a potato there, from outside the ghetto a looter.
There are no looters in Haiti. OK. Let us say, there are virtually no looters in Haiti. In the nature of things, Im sure there are a few bad apples who steal. But the overwhelming mass of people are desperate, simply trying to survive. These are people not only without a roof over their heads, but without even a tent.
When I think of a looter, I think of a rioter in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in 1965 breaking into an appliance store and walking off with a TV set. Thats looting. Thats stealing. Thats criminality.
People desperate for a drink of water are not looters.
People who have children perhaps half as many as they did two weeks ago whom they cannot feed, and suddenly see an MRE (meal read to eat) and take it, are not looters.
Here is a situation in which the word tragedy truly applies. A tragedy is not just a terrible event, but an unpreventible one, one not caused by ones personal inadequacies. If aid is not getting through in an organized way, its not likely anyones fault. Too much has been destroyed.
Not, I am sure, that there have not been mistakes. But they seem to pale compared to the scale of the dimensions of the loss.
I wonder what the UN soldier himself would do if he were in the position of the people hes trying to stop from looting. I wonder what anyone would do.
I wonder which philosopher, theologian or honest politician would call a person without shelter, without food, without family, living amongst destroyed buildings and mass graves, who takes some food when he sees it.
Would they call him a looter?
Looting presumes control, greed and immorality. Again, that store glass shattered and that TV stolen thats being in control, living ones greed and violating thou shalt not steal.
The people in Haiti are not in control, certainly not acting out of greed and likely would prefer to be given the food on a regular basis in an organized manner.
Bottom line: I dont get it. How is a person in Haiti today a looter?
The use of this term for Haitians is a first-class example of the disconnect, the imposition of inappropriate terms and values by the free and the secure on the unfree and the insecure.
The use of the term looter is not even a matter of multiculturalism, of cultural dissonance, of one culture confusing its values with anothers.
When it comes to starvation, all human beings seek to live. This is as universal, as non-multicultural, as it gets. To call Haitians today looters is just plain stupid.
