"Leave the looters alone! They're the only ones helping us!" - New Orleans refugee
Your mother, your sister, your child is starving to death. What do you do? You go in search of food.
Where are the food animals? Where the veggies?
What do you do when the only food is in stores? Let your family die, because stealing is illegal, and may wind up landing you in jail?
Or do you do everything you can to keep your family alive...even if it means sacrificing your freedom?
Looters are not all doing honorable work, but some may well be heroes.
But Bush says there should be zero tolerance for looters. Who will be at fault when people die in droves because of starvation?
We need to consider the needs of those who need help, and not those who will have a bad month in sales, but will lose no family member because of it.
Any food or medicine left in the stores of New Orleans should be released and given to those who need it. If Americans have to pay back the stores...so be it. There is already help in New Orleans...locked in the stores that will probably go out of business anyway. This poll suggests that stores should be opened, and food and medicine released.
Use what is already there, and keep the people there from having to loot and thus become criminals just because they are trying to save lives.
Use your hearts!
And speaking of which...how about some entertainment for the refugees at the Houston Astrodome...and job and home opportunities...
Idea: Bring emergency clean-up experts into the Houston Astrodome to teach able-bodied men and women how to carefully and properly clean up after, say, hurricanes. Teach them also how to construct emergency shelters. Then bring them back to New Orleans and put them to work constructing their own (then others') shelter, from which they do what they were taught, radiating from their shelter.
Article comments
1 - David Flanagan
I agree with you that people seeking food and water from any source possible are not looters. I don't think authorities, or the President considers them to be looters either.
I think the concern is mainly over those who began looting shops and stores for cash, jewelry, clothes, electronics, and anything else they could get their hands on and who then moved into private neighborhoods to break into houses to do the same there. I could be wrong, but I think people stealing things other than what they need to survive will be targeted.
Thanks,
David
2 - anonyMoses
At all levels, greed is a sin. I would bet that those who are being merely greedy are either stupid or addicted to crack or something, and are out of control. The drug addict, and even alcohol and cigarette addict problem is still in its infancy, and may wind up being where the real violence finds its epicenter.
The useful goods in the stores should be no more difficult to distribute than "official help"...that might not arrive until its too late.
Thanks for your observation!
Dave
3 - Jude
A good idea. It would be a win-win situation to let the goods go (most is probably water-logged, anyhow) and let insurance cover the business losses...and ask government to cover that which private insurance will not.
4 - saywhat!
Ya that pair of sneakers sho wuz tasy!!