Bisbee wrote: Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:35 pm
Wino wrote: Tue Nov 23, 2021 9:06 am
I have nothing but contempt for thievery !! Having been on the receiving end of auto theft, auto break ins, home robbery, stealing things I worked hard to pay for is a bit unsettling. There is a huge difference in stealing an apple pie off a window shelf because you are starving and just outright theft of anyone's or things property. Inequities are no excuse for stealing - I don't care who or what you are or one's lot in life, it does not entitle anyone to theft.
Wino, I write this to help expand your view of “stealing” and add to the process of understanding that you have already started upon. You agree that there is no monolithic reason why people steal. Their motivations are important to differentiate who they are. One steals food out of desperation and a need for survival. Another steals property to enrich himself at the cost of a stranger (or worse a friend or family member who trusted them). Now, consider the mythical Robin Hood character. The troublemaker who wishes to upset the status-quo and redress some social inequity and reduce the suffering of the powerless by giving them what he has stolen from the rich? Of course that sort of thief is celebrated in the public consciousness and many mafia bosses have considered themselves variants of such “honorable criminals”. What is less celebrated are simply the angry poor. Such as those who started the French Revolution. The ones who spontaneously organized to upend the system though revolution and “eat the rich”. Yes, we actually celebrate those people through broadway plays. Yet if they are colored folks who smash and grab Fendi purses or Gucci outfits, somehow that is less glamorous. Consider also that these stores are completely “insured”. These luxury stores are not victims like you or me. (Their employees may be the victims if they don’t have a sales job to return to a looted store the next day but that is beside the point.) A thief stealing your car (to cut up and sell as parts) that you need to get to work is clearly evil as the victim bears all the cost as well as future losses (not being able to get to work). But that is quite different than an ignorant thief who steals handbags to sell on Craigslist when the store suffers no losses, are fully insured, and nobody needs the handbag to do anything (it is literally a bobble for rich folks’ egos).
Stealing a handbag off the shoulder of an owner is even different than stealing the exact same handbag from a store. In corporate stores there truly are no direct victims (though they would like us to believe otherwise). One could possibly say the most direct victim in the recent smash & grabs are the thieves themselves who have been living under such economic or social pressures that they explode in rage or believe that risking police beating, arrest and jail is worth some spontaneous act of immediate gratification. These people live both as outcasts of society and in total ignorance to their power to create or ensnared in illusions (such as the value of luxury goods to their lives).
My point is not to exonerate crimes or criminals. It is to help all of us see beyond the limitations of our current perspectives. Not doing so keeps all of us mired in conflict over crumbs and trapped by our collective illusions over what is real; blind to the solutions to pertinent social challenges.
Then allow me to add to this understanding. Desperately hungry people breaking into a grocery store and stealing food is one thing. It's a crime, yes, but an understandable one. Breaking into stores to grab Gucci, et. al, however, is BS. Gucci bags are not food. Manolo shoes are not food. Breakfast cereal and milk, though, are.
And I would remind people here that some of the businesses that get looted and destroyed are Black-owned and thus already disadvantaged. We need those businesses, and we need them intact, not destroyed.
https://www.newsweek.com/looters-exploi ... es-1509777
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... ebuilding/