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