Maybe you saw this story on Sunday about the rescue and relief efforts in Chile following Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 earthquake. At first glance, it’s just your average recap of a major disaster: what happened, how many are dead, how bad the damage is and various accounts of those who made it and those who didn’t. But as I read the article further, several passages jumped out at me:
Paragraph 7: “Virtually every market and supermarket had been looted — and no food or drinking water could be found. Many people in Concepcion expressed anger at the authorities for not stopping the looting or bringing in supplies. Electricity and water services were out of service.”
Paragraph 13: “To strip away any need for looting, [President] Bachelet announced that essentials on the shelves of major supermarkets would be given away for free, under the supervision of authorities. Soldiers and police will also distribute food and water, she said.”
And beginning with paragraph 25: “One woman ran off with a shopping cart piled high with slabs of unwrapped meat and cheese. A shirtless man carried a mattress on his head. Some of the looters pitched rocks at police armored vehicles outside the Lider market, which is majority-owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
“Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.
“‘It was a mob. They looted everything,’ said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, 46, who had his men guarding the now-empty mall. ‘Now we’re only here to protect the building — what’s left of the building.’
“He said police had been slow to reach the looted mall because one bridge over the river was collapsed and the other so damaged they had to move cautiously.
“Ingenious looters even used long tubes of bamboo and plastic to siphon gasoline from underground tanks at a closed gasoline station. Others rummaged through the station’s restaurant.
“Thieves attacked a flour mill in Concepcion — some toting away bags on their shoulders, others using bicycles or cars. One man packed a school bus with sacks of flour.
“Many defended the scavenging — of food if not television sets — as a necessity because officials had not brought food or water. Even Concepcion’s mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, complained that no food aid was reaching the city. She said the federal government should send troops to help halt the looting.”
Now let’s break this down:
Markets have been looted after the earthquake. No food and water can be found. People are mad at the government for not stopping stuff from being taken or bringing in more stuff (which could also theoretically be stolen by looters). So to make sure would-be looters don’t “need” to loot, the government does the looting for them–confiscating goods from merchants to give away free to hungry, thirst, angry people.
I’m sure the shop owners whose goods have been appropriated away aren’t happy about their losses, even though the confiscation of their goods was legal as long as the government did it. And even though there were a lot of people made happy by the freebies the government gave them, I’m guessing there were a lot more people who went away unhappy when the government ran out of free stuff to give them, after which the unsanctioned looting continued.
And police and other authorities continued to be overwhelmed and unable to do much that mattered. And hungry, angry people continued their looting.
There were probably freeloaders whose survival didn’t depend on what they were stealing. A lot of people were probably stealing just so they could make a few bucks. But what if there were people who didn’t need to wait for a government handout, while supplies last, because they had stocked up on food and water and had personal protection and other vital items, just in case?
Mobs of hungry, angry people don’t do much to ensure one’s personal safety or peace of mind. It’s always a good thing to stay away from those mobs unless absolutely necessary. And quite frankly I can’t think of a compelling reason at the moment to join a mob of hungry, angry people. In fact, I’d like to do everything I can to make sure I (legally) obtain things I will need to take care of myself and my family and the means to protect what I have. Or I could take the easy way out and just wait for FEMA to show up and repeat the stellar performance they had after Hurricane Katrina. It’s free. Courtesy of the U.S. Government. How long it will take help to arrive, and how much or how little they can do for you…yeah, good luck with that.
You can wait with all of the other hungry, angry people who get hungrier and angrier as they wait for the government to take care of them. Or you can start now to prepare your family for any emergencies that you might encounter. When the next disaster hits, wouldn’t the biggest disaster be if you weren’t ready?
No comments:
Post a Comment