Beg, steal or borrow? Looting is all relative

Beg, steal or borrow? Looting is all relative

JAKARTA (JP): At the risk of sounding archly melodramatic, a
common affliction in the media these days, I count myself among
those Jakarta residents who will never forget the past May 14.

But then who possibly could? The day (it was sunny when I
walked out the door) started out fine enough. I was at the office
by 8:30 a.m. and was preparing to go out briefly a couple of
hours later for lunch when rumblings of something amiss started.

At first, I thought it was just the proverbial rumor mill, in
full swing in recent months. But ominous spirals of black smoke
from the west of the city silenced my doubts. The "mob" was no
phantom of our imaginations; soon the office had closed its
gates, moved a conspicuously large TV set from the glass-fronted
lobby and rolled out its fire hoses.

There was an eerie silence as we listened to the radio reports
(medals for distinguished public service should be given to the
people at Sonora and Maria Ressa of CNN) as though anxiously
awaiting the inevitable advancement of a hurricane.

As it turned out, we were not in its eye. Not so lucky was the
department store and row of small shops just 200 meters down the
street. After the vandals had finished their work, people emerged
like a swarm of locusts to pick the buildings clean of everything
and anything they could get their hands on and lug them back to
their homes. Then they set the buildings on fire.

To me, watching from my safe perch in the office, the festive
atmosphere accompanying the mayhem was like something from a
grotesque Bosch painting or Fellini movie. Children hauled TV
sets, men almost broke their backs trying to carry refrigerators
and people suddenly had whole new wardrobes, even if the shoes
they grabbed were different brands and sizes.

Cordoned off in my ivory tower, I felt sick to my stomach. I
can say honestly that I did not fear for my personal safety, but
instead the impending loss of my livelihood and the creature
comforts I have come to enjoy.

Like a second Lebaran, one colleague said of the stream of
people making their way along the street with their booty. A
reporter who had been in the thick of things told me in hushed
tones that the looters "had faces just like us. They weren't
monsters".

Speak for yourself, I thought, as I spent a sleepless night
emotionally masticating all that had happened and why. For me, an
anthropology major, the incident sent all my assumptions about
people and the trumpeted "social contract" flying out the window.

It continued into the next day, even after I angrily changed
the TV channel after some fleeing expatriate talked about her
three cars in the garage and how they could have been burned.
Bloody insensitive woman, I thought, most Indonesians cannot even
afford one vehicle.

When I got a caption of a charred body, probably that of a
looter, removed from one of the gutted shopping plazas, I found
it extremely difficult to sympathize.

I walked around for a couple of days with a self-righteous
sneer on my face, wondering if everyone who passed was enjoying
their ill-gotten gains. The presence of three Army trucks at the
end of the street did much to assuage my fears.

It was then that I began to see the irony of it all. While my
insular middle-class sensibility rejoiced at the sight of
soldiers in combat uniform to keep the riffraff at bay, I had not
blinked an eyelid as "looting" on a much grander scale went on
during the past few years.

It was all so pat back then. The country's riches may have
been raped and pillaged, its banking system used for private
largess, but it did not affect me if it was not in my own
backyard. As long as all the terrible excesses, the greed and
insincere protestations to upholding democracy had no direct
effect on my immediate life, it was quite all right, thank you.

But, of course, what goes around, comes around, and our lives
can never be detached from the injustices surrounding us, even if
we build big walls and guard ourselves with private armies.

This is a simple but shocking truth that the most grasping,
heinous looters of all may well be confronting today.

-- Bruce Emond