Posted on 08/30/2005 12:59:42 PM PDT by LM_Guy
NEW ORLEANS — With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could.
In some cases, looting today took place in full view of police and National Guard troops.
At a Walgreen's drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers.
When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, "86! 86!" — the radio code for police — and the crowd scattered.
Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement.
"It's downtown Baghdad," the housewife said. "It's insane. I've wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not."
Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores.
One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store.
"No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store."
Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by.
Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold.
"To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," he said.
A man walked down Canal Street with a pallet of food on his head. His wife, who refused to give her name, insisted they weren't stealing from the nearby Winn-Dixie supermarket. "It's about survival....
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
In fact, it would be more accurate to call them racial uprisings, although that's probably still too volatile a term.
I haven't read the whole thread but am inclined to agree with you. Food and diapers are a lot different from plasma TVs and laptop computers. If the food is just going to be flooded and spoil anyway, and the people have no other food, why the hell not take it? I would certainly be trying to find milk for my kids, for one thing. I really could care less if anyone has "moral" problems with this; the moral imperative to feed your family trumps the technicality of "theft" (of soon to be useless smelly trash), by a long shot. Always watch out for people who express phony moral concern when a more important issue is at stake.
No food store can sell food, even after minor flooding, if there is even a slight chance it has been in any way contaminated.
Ummm, no, it doesn't, but it certainly does explain the racial composition of the looters. LOL
they are just taking what the society owed them...
IF THEY ARE IN THEIR HOUSES ANY MORE. With all the flooding, sounds like people are holing up in any high spot they can find.
Actually, if you look at THAT photo, the woman appears to have bottled water and a bottle of bleach in her other hand. . .
If she's looting, she's looting for survival rations in the photo. . . and you use bleach to purify dirty water to make it drinkable.
Just wondering, was that illiterating to Total recall?
Society owes them plasma TVs and free beer!?!?!
Where is mine?
....and civil rights and race relations just got set back yet another 30 years.
It's better than NOT having 6 Rolexes. Ya gotta admit that.
Oh, silly, insensitive me!
When someone say "it's not about the money", it's about the money.
When a someone says, 'trust me," don't.
And if you're told you're not going to be hurt, you probably are...
And when you're told "to be honest with you" the person's not being honest.
No one's "getting back," they're just "getting." Honest trustworhy people don't have to tell you what they are and they don't "get back".
The violent methods of the 60s were an abject failure. I haven't the slightest dispute with that. Whatever was achieved by whomever was ultimately achieved via peaceful methods. That is a credit to our society, BTW.
However, what we're discussing is whether one race is more predisposed to looting than another. I would say that the notion is nonsense and readily dismissed by history. European society has a long history of riots and looting to prove that whites are just as capable of that as are blacks.
I wonder, then, where they are taking the food (and beer)? If their houses are gone, they should be getting themselves to a Red Cross shelter, not the the Sack 'O Suds.
they need the plasma TV to watch their neighbors on JERRY SPRINGER !
Of course not. In Philadelphia the starving gentry would be queuing patiently outside the stores smoking pipes and telling each other high brow anecdotes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.