...people are looting brazenly, right in front of the police and military. They keep saying "survival" and whatnot, but people are stealing house slippers and televisions. I don't know what possible use house slippers and televisions have.
Oh, New Orleans . . . I'm so glad I decided to go to Temple instead of Tulane.
Wow. House slippers, huh?
Sometimes you just have to throw your hands in the air; exclaiming "people are weird".
If I was to speculate (as I'm prone to do) about what might motivate people to such sheer, stubborn stupidity as described above, I suppose the very simple answer would be the biblical terms of 'lust' and 'greed'.
In itself, that doesn't really explain anything, though. According to the more elaborate Freudian psychoanalysts approach, all human behavior and inhibition stems from the ego struggling to gain control of its own life, confronted with impulses under the generalized headings of sexdrive and deathdrive.
What might be of relevance here is the almost sensual way that the mind takes to (new or old) ideas of how to gain further control their lives (as exemplified by my own proneness to analytic speculation).
Ironically, it is driven to do so by the same impulses and present ordering structures made to deal with those impulses (as the 'ego' stems from, and is part of the 'id', really, according to Freud.) This could be compared to the way a coral reef grows; on the carcasses of life gone before, if you then ascribe an architechtural ambition to the organisms doing so... The point is, that once your mind starts to go down a certain 'path' or way of thinking, it is harder to turn back than you might imagine. (Sometimes, the only way to regain 'control' is by a gradual reinterpretation of your own life, actually based on rhetorical principles of euphemisms and vilification, until you've managed to make heartfelt and behavioral truth of what used to be somewhat superficial rhetorics.)
What I'm suggesting is that the winner of the lottery turning crook might plausibly have done so, because the real situation of having won the lottery turns out to be a lot more complex, and less satisfying, than it was in fact built up to be. He expected to be able to do... whatever... without a care in the world; but suddenly finds that there are in fact certain limits to what he might do with the sum he's won. What's worse, his lowdown familiy is eyeing his winnings with obvious envy. In the end, he finds himself on the streets, perhaps even leading the looting, in effort to somehow sate their hunger, and in turn be able to retire in peace to his own little slice of paradise.
In similar fashion, when poor people (or people who can't help but regard themselves as impoverished, which is pretty much the same thing) get the idea that they are missing out on a way to bring themselves into a land of luxury (a fantasy that they already have huge ordering structures devoted to), that idea can pretty much have the power to shut down their ability to think, and to make rational decisions. Not absolutely, of course.
Just enough to make them lose their footing, and start shooting at the police, standing between them, and the break they always wanted.
