[Mb-civic] Our Rules vs. The Poor - William Raspberry - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Our Rules vs. The Poor

By William Raspberry
Monday, September 12, 2005; Page A19

The Duke University class I teach on family and community had no trouble 
with the New Orleans "looters" who smashed store windows for food and 
clothing. They had done their reading, so they understood that an 
important element of what makes a community work is the willingness of 
people to abide by agreed-upon rules.

But the floods and impending starvation on the Gulf Coast, they agreed, 
suspended the rules. Survival was an overriding "virtue," they said -- 
so long as the necessities weren't taken directly from another person in 
similar desperate straits.

And maybe even then, some of them thought. While a few would choose to 
die rather than wrest food from the gnarled hands of a starving old 
woman, several thought that the biological imperative to survive might 
trump even such uncivilized behavior as that.

No senseless looting for material goods (even if the purloined laptop 
might become the price of a ride to Baton Rouge?). No firing on rescue 
workers. No carjackings. But if the waters were rising swiftly enough, 
and the helicopter lifts were working slowly enough, one could perhaps 
justify elbowing one's way nearer to the front of the rescue line. After 
all, though one might defer to a weaker blood relative or spouse, 
survival is the most basic urge there is.

Then I reminded them of what they all knew: that sometime in the next 
few weeks, when things have returned to normal and Hurricane Katrina has 
been replaced by Supreme Court confirmation hearings or escalating 
slaughter in Iraq as Topic A, they will see on the 6 o'clock news some 
teenager accused of shooting a shopkeeper or robbing a convenience store 
or selling crack. And the youngster's explanation for his dreadful 
behavior? "You got to survive."

The point of this small exercise was neither to justify lawlessness nor 
to raise looting to a level of particular importance in the catastrophe 
that befell the Gulf Coast. It was, rather, to observe that the rules -- 
legislated and otherwise -- that make our communities work don't exist 
as moral abstractions. We uphold them because they work for us -- at 
least until we find ourselves under water.

What we forget is that some people in some communities see themselves as 
under water pretty much all the time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/11/AR2005091101087.html
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