And Kelley weighs in:
> Yeah. This happened after Andrew. People looted. Fights broke out and
> people stole from each other, completely stressed from waiting hours in
the
> heat for bottled water and ice. They'd already had to traipse from
> whereever, towing stuff i strollers, Radio Flyer kiddie wagons, and the
> like. Then they had to wait in line in the heat. They looted private
homes.
> There's some public service video that you can order when you first move
> here, and it's shown on the telly all during hurricane season, to educate
> people about the seriousness of a hurricane.
Obviously, there are many ways to look at this, especially from the comfort of one's air-conditioned office. One of these ways is to treat this disaster as a rare social "breeching experiment," which in sociology refers to a situation when the norms of everyday behavior are intentionally breeched to test the behavior without them.
This breeching "experiment" basically belies the claims of anarchists and their likes that people will self organize from below as soon as the oppressive norms and institutions of the state and capitalist society are abolished. Well, these norms and institutions were abolished in NO and what ensued is total chaos and gangsterism - just as the institutionalists (such as myself) would predict.
The usual excuses (false consciousness, survival etc.) do not save anarchism from empirical refutation because they simply imply that for self-management form below to emerge, certain norms and rules of behavior must remain in place. So where are those norms and rules are supposed to come from if not from the actually existing institutions? It seems that anarchism needs the order created by the status quo to be a viable form of social organization - which is quite ironic for the ideology that claims abolition of the institutional status quo.
Of course, there are other lessons coming from this disaster - such as the criminal lack of disaster preparedness by the authorities, especially federal government - which are being picked even by the mainstream media. I can only hope that people at last start seeing that the emperor Bush and his gang (may they be hanged by the balls from lampposts) have no clothes and their raid on the treasury to reward their obscenely rich cronies is now starting to bite everyone else in this country. But I think it would be instructive for the folk on this list to bracket out, so to speak, this finger pointing at the usual suspects, and reflect for a while what this situation means for our own sacred beliefs and received wisdom.
Wojtek