Just saw videos of thefts of malls in usa. How can this be allowed??
I originally read that as "theft of
mail", to which I thought "that's brave" - you generally don't mess with postal inspectors, they take their job
seriously.
As for theft of malls...
My theory is that most Americans have not experienced a
real crisis (health or otherwise), something that has a real effect on our daily lives, in living memory. I think the last health crisis that had a real impact across the country was polio, when parents wouldn't let their kids out of the house for weeks or months at at time. But thanks to Jonas Salk, that's not an issue anymore. Since then, we've never had to really inconvenience ourselves on a large scale. We've been at war for almost 20 years now, but you wouldn't know it. Hell, we were told
explicitly not to let the fact that we were at war interfere with shopping.
So the idea that there's a crisis we can't shop our way out of has people a little freaked. We just have no cultural basis anymore to act towards the common good by moderating our usual gluttony, and that's just
inconceivable - it's the end of the goddamned world as we know it.
We've become an infantile, self-obsessed, self-centered culture, and we put people just like us in charge.
So yeah, at times like this, we start looting.