Literacy and Looting

Since the earthquake in Chile, the semantic argument about what to call "looting" has been revisited. Recently in Haiti the same problem arose, and both instances have brought hurricane Katrina back to American consciousness. This article addresses the question "should we call it looting," and this thread of comments from gawker shows a pretty good debate over the same thing between people completely unaffected by this disaster.

I tend to have a reaction to questions about what is literacy that is similar to how some people feel about calling it looting: as one commenter puts it, it's an empty semantics argument. I have struggled in my reader-response writing assignments for Peter Goggin's Theories of Literacy class. Some telling quotes coming from these assignments include "if we stopped calling it literacy and started calling it oxygen, there would still be people who don't have it, it would just sound weirder" and "the problem becomes the (possibly inescapable) one of simply living in a culture that is constantly divided between the haves and the have-nots," therefore the problem is with culture, not the definition. I had been assuming the term "literacy" was being used similarly to the way the word "tool" has been used: "my dictionary describes a tool as an implement used to carry out a specific function, which sounds physical and mechanical, but many people would say that meditation is a tool to help deal with stress or similar, using the understood function of a physical 'tool' to infer its properties to something more difficult to understand."

But then I read this editorial on usatoday.com and my perception changes. This article attempts to draw a line between "survival tactics" and "looting," but falls short of coming up with any definition. The most the article achieves is speculating that we "imagine that we would respect the laws even as we tried to feed, clothe and find fuel ... as our families huddled on open ground to avoid aftershocks" before asking vaguely, "Are we so sure? Where's the line between looting and survival tactics?"

Are they seriously considering that what the people in Haiti and Chile are doing (that is, taking food from crumbling stores in order to feed themselves and those they are caring for) is morally wrong? I thought the issue was making it sound like these people are stealing only for personal gain instead of survival. And then it occurred to me that even if I designate a semantic argument over designating this aspect of the aftermath of a disaster as "empty" or "pointless," it doesn't stop other people from having certain associations with the word, and it certainly doesn't stop others from using the ambiguity of the language to denigrate entire groups of people and further their personal agenda by creating their own version of events. Clearly it is important to define our terms (at least the hotly contested ones) before using them and openly acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses. But now I am even beginning to imagine a discussion about these terms to be necessary, if frustrating, because without this discussion, we abandon the "other" to the mercies of our unexamined assumptions. And that's not acceptable for "us" or for "them."