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15 years?
for stealing booze?
that's absurd, wholly out of whack with the actual crime these folk were convicted for.
sounds more like a show trial type situation to me: much more about affirming existing social hierarchies than about what these folk actually did.
insofar as the three people who were convicted function for folk who read about them as abstractions and not as human beings whose lives are going to be sacrificed for the greater good of private property, this does not seem to be a problem. i would imagine that views would be different if you knew--or even thought about---these people as human beings.
it seems to me that the misfortune suffered by these three folk, more than any other, is being among the first convicted under the new (and repressive) sentencing guidlines for emergency situations. i assume that these folk were not in a position to have good legal counsel, or maybe did not expect such a ridiculous sentence was possible--either way, a decent lawyer would have made sure this was not among the first cases to go through the system--let someone who actually committed a serious offense get the Symbolic Book of Bourgeois Property Relations thrown at them.
the claim that "stealing is stealing" seems ridiculous in this context.
i suspect that behind it is a reaction to the television footage of looting that took place in the wake of katrina--and behind that assumptions that the existing system of property relations is somehow legitimate and so those who transgress it should fry. i say this because "stealing is stealing" only makes sense on those grounds: stealing booze is not like stealing a car is not like stealing technology for nuclear weapons--stealing is not a single action--you only can arrive at that conclusion if you confuse the characteristics of stealing as a gerund with the range of actions that itcanbe made to refer to. and again, if folk who approve of this draconian sentence above knew these three people--or even thought about them as human beings--that argument would not be advanced. it has no correlate in actual law (sentences are different from different types of offense, folks--if you were caught stealing lipstick from a mall store, that act is not the same as if you were caught stealing a semi-automatic rifle. not legally. not empirically.)
what i find most amazing, however, is that folk above seem to have been more bothered by the private property being removed than by the social conditions that were revealed through katrina and the multiple debacles involved with it and its aftermath. you had a really ugly view of the reality of class stratification in america--and you worry about booze being stolen. you had a glimpse of the extent to which the american system grinds up the lives of the poor--and you identify with the owner of a liquor store?
i dont get it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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