Rioting and destruction in response to atrocity: it's impossible not to justify the angry passion of people deeply hurt by atrocious injustice directed toward them; but were they provoked for economic reasons by a culture of creative destruction that uses sacrifice like a surgical tool to stimulate destruction-driven rebuilding for the sake of the economic investment and job-creation that is expected to flow from it?
There seems to be at least one headline that notes the significance of property destruction as a harm to the people seemingly in favor of it as retaliation for unbearable atrocity/persecution:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rapper-killer-mike-pleads-with-atlanta-demonstrators-to-burn-systemic-racism-not-specific-targets/
But is there any place for conspiracy theory, or even just to note the sickening pattern of destruction-driven economic-stimulus that occurs during times like this when public riots bloom from the seed of a tremendously-unjust human sacrifice, whether it is a young person by police or a political leader like MLK who is used to spark the fire that will not stop burning until it has consumed enough fuel of human spirit and property to satisfy it?
Let us pray for mercy and grace while remembering the early awareness of creative destruction from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (quoted below), where the destruction of fruit seems small in a modern world where hunger seems like something far away and/or a relic of generations past to most people. Should we be glad that at least people aren't starving while cities burn? Or should we be sad that people have been provoked into burning property that will ultimately be rebuilt in a way that sustains their subordinate economic status while producing much bigger gains for higher ups who live in richer areas?
Historic buildings and neighborhoods are supposed to doubly benefit the poor-and-rising by growing more affordable as they age, while also offering opportunities for refurbishment that give up-and-coming locals a canvas to affordably invest their own labor without the huge investments required to rebuild structures and infrastructure from the ground (or rubble) up.
Isn't it sad when people are provoked into destroying the opportunity to honor the vintage properties of the areas where they have grown up and lived by a modernist economic culture that gladly and/or angrily burns the present and past to replace it with sterile new construction that is as wasteful of life, resources, and spiritually as the provocation(s) that motivated it?
Quote:
from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
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