by MICHAEL ALBERT
I remember first hearing the phrase, “Shoot the looters to kill” in 1968, with its parent being the then despicable Mayor Daley of Chicago.
I was young, incredibly angry, and very militant. I remember my first thought was okay, but which looters? Shooting people is outrageous, but I wondered does “looters” include corporate heads, real estate moguls, those who invade and plunder? If not, why not? They are mega looters. The only bad looter is a little looter?
I remember my second thought too. Some things stick in the mind, I guess, especially after you set them to paper, as I did then. The second thought stemmed from an essay I had read. The title was “Why don’t hungry people steal?”, or something very close to that.
The point of the essay was why don’t people made hungry by injustice steal? Shouldn’t they?
Some looters are rich and powerful. They perpetually seek still more wealth and power. They steal from those below to rise higher above.
Other people are poor and denied influence. They choose between food and medicine. Sometimes they loot. They do it typically from stores and institutions wealthier by far than themselves – and to get something instead of nothing.
And the article was wondering what psychological and material factors prevented more people who had incredibly strong reasons to do so, from looting in order to better survive, or even to be a little better off, or even just to exert influence, albeit of a constrained sort. I wondered the answer to that too. Yes, I felt, it is partly repressive power waiting to punish those below for any deviation from docility. But I thought, and still think, it is even more so an inclination to be civil even while enduring perpetual incivility.
Consider a seemingly minor but perhaps instructive couple of examples. It is 2 AM. Why pay off-ramp highway tolls if no one is there? Isn’t that just an inclination to civility?
Or, it is a soul-meltingly hot midday. You are walking down the street alone. You see a young child with an ice cream cone. You are parched. Why don’t you approach the child, take the cone, swat him out of the way, and walk on? You don’t do it because you are not a thug. You are civil. You are moral. But Donald Trump and the big looters, they do that all the time. It is their profession. But they do it for big wealth, big power, not an ice cream cone. Their direct victims are only rarely children, but their direct victims are always folks unable to resist.
So then some blue-shirted thug puts his knee down through a life and anger explodes. And in the next instant the blue shirted gatekeepers are outnumbered at the gates of rooms full of otherwise out of reach food or merchandise. More, the moment seems one in which real civility, real attention to morality, is on the side of resistance. It is in the streets. Looting follows.
Little looters. Shoot them? Hate them? Revile them? Use them as an excuse to bolster big-scale looting? Use them to grow forces of repression? Use them to hail big chiefs? All that is disgusting, but it is deemed appropriate in our upside down world.
Z Communications for more