LOOKING FOR A REASON

On the morning after the looting orgy, the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario front-paged in huge type the question that was on nearly every New Yorker's mind: ?POR QUE? (Why?).

What had sparked the plunder?

What had changed since that placid blackout night of 1965? Doubtless the heat and humidity made some difference; in 1965 the power failed on a pleasantly cool evening in November. But much more had changed in a dozen years. Respect for law and authority has declined; thieves often go unpunished; crime and violence stalk the slums. So, of course, does poverty. Unemployment among young ghetto blacks is as high as 40%, v. more than 20% in 1965.

Close to half of American black families have advanced to the middle class, but their rise has only increased the frustration of an underclass that sees no way up. Says Harvard Social Psychologist Robert Bales: "When economic conditions get better, those who are left behind get angrier." Before their eyes dance television programs and commercials that show everybody enjoying a cornucopia of consumer goods--as if everybody should have them as a natural right. They feel no stake in a society that seems to deny them the opportunity to acquire those goods. Northwestern Political Scientist Ted Gurr, co-author of the 1969 Eisenhower Commission report on violence in America, argues that "the poor, and especially poor blacks, don't share our middle-class values for other people's property. The goods were there for the taking."

Many black and Hispanic leaders read in the looting a message to the nation. Says Educator Kenneth Clark: "We have reduced the people of the ghetto to the point where they function on the level of predatory animals." Adds U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young: "If you turn the lights out, folks will steal. They'll do that especially if they're hungry." That went a bit far--even in the ghetto, few Americans do not have enough to eat.

Psychologist Morton Bard of the Graduate Center of New York's City University regarded the pillage as "a Robin Hood-type of thing--steal from the rich and give to the poor." But the explanation that leans on real and perceived deprivation goes only so far. It is by no means clear that most of the looters were the neediest. There was an element of glee, perhaps of revenge, of a mob gone wild. Says Bard: "The looting had a quality of madness. I cannot believe that they cleaned out a store of prayer shawls and Bibles." Adds Ernest Dichter, a noted behavioral psychologist: "It was just like Lord of the Flies. People resort to savage behavior when the brakes of civilization fail."

Harvard Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew was impressed by the lack of ideology in the looting--a striking contrast to the 1960s riots. Says he: "When the lights went out, there was a free-for-all, an individualistic phenomenon in which everyone gets what he or she can get." Declared Futurist Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute: "They have no idea of what moral standards are. This 'suppressed rage' idea is crap. This kind of reasoning will make the same thing happen all over again."

Like most other experts, Harvard Sociologist Talcott Parsons is "skeptical" that the pillage in New York would set off a new nationwide wave of disturbances. But behaviorists generally believe that, given a similar combination of total darkness, blistering heat and simmering anger on the part of an underclass, much the same kind of riotous looting could erupt in almost any other city in the U.S.

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