On the nature of lawlessness, the motivations of looters, and the pernicious influence of hatred in our community.

My longtime friend Joe, a keen observer of the human condition and possessor of a long memory, surely will object to the lack of specificity prevalent herein, reminding me that there have been times when I objected to the trait in other writers.

And yet, I’m confident that my readers will understand the basis of these sentiments – if not today, then perhaps later.

Being a victim of criminal lawlessness is by no means enjoyable or excusable under any circumstances, but after careful consideration, I’m prepared to argue that in some cases at least it can be rationally understood -- although neither sanctioned nor condoned -- more easily than in others.

For instance, take the relatively common crime of burglary.

In this day and age, most of us have come to understand that items stolen in the vast majority of burglaries are not being used to adorn the living quarters of the perpetrator.

Rather, they’re being sold to finance one of the many varieties of drug habits, which we as a society prefer to criminalize and only reluctantly to treat as the illnesses as they really are, thus helping establish and maintain the market price of addiction and to create an attractive incentive for a brand of thievery that, in the end, merely emulates the “legitimate” supply/demand, dog-eat-dog economy from whence it mimics.

While in high school, my family was burglarized twice, once for kicks and drug money, and the second for drug money alone. Years later, my business was robbed. It was a classically “inside” job, with no wasted motion on the part of intruders who knew exactly what they wanted, and where to find it. Again, the logistics of drug finance were the underlying reason for the break-in.

We filed insurance claims, and perhaps learned as much as possible from the experience, given that we’re law-abiding citizens – installing security systems, putting valuables in the safe deposit box, and the like.

But what if you’re the victim of a crime, and the underlying rationale is not support of an addiction, but to engender fear, to intimidate, to let the victim know clearly and without any doubt that he, she and “their type” are the subjects of hatred – a crime designed to hurt, and to bludgeon the victim into silence – what then?

It must be conceded that crimes committed against an individual not because he has something of real value to steal, but because of who he is, what he knows, what he says, or how he lives his life, rank more heinously in the pantheon of human depravity than pilferage by the ill and addicted.

Splitting hairs? Perhaps, but as I suspect any African-American will attest, it’s one thing to have your mailbox vandalized, and another entirely to awaken to a cross burning in the front yard. The first act of vandalism generally can be rationalized as random in nature, but the second clearly goes further, into the realm of violence, insinuated or perpetrated, for cultural, racial or political reasons.

Recognition of this difference is why sensible people delineate simple brutishness and thuggery from the calculated terror that lies at the conceptual basis of the hate crime.

We’re left with speculation eternal as to exactly why the human animal has the capacity to hate, to oppress and to destroy.

Perhaps it is the polarity of opposites … gist for the denizens of the agora in ancient Greece, and in large measure unchanged during three millennia later.

For literacy is anathema to the illiterate, and culture to the uncultured. When it comes to the devil one knows, the only sure thing about it is that the untutored, the inbred and the envious almost always will prefer succor from the poverty, ignorance and violence borne of their unfortunate experiences, and just as certainly will seek to place the blame for even the slightest hint of helpful change on the part of those whose dynamism and vision often have been the sole impetus for progress on the planet Earth: The thinkers, the planners, the immigrants, the educated, the outsiders – the doers, not the looters … those who add value to our world, not subtract it.

Of course, to embrace this scenario is to ignore the possibility that what seems to bear all the hallmarks of a hate crime might in fact be nothing more than petty vandalism and rage contributed by the congenitally incapable -- but conversely, it also does not take into account possible motives of a far more venal, self-protective and damning nature.

If the very same relatively privileged people, those who insist on the necessity of wearing masks to ward off reprisals from the lawful, turn out to have fostered a bilious atmosphere in which certain seemingly threatened paragons of traditional virtue feel compelled to don their own masks and enter a dark realm of unlawful reprisal against those who have erred only by daring to teach the unlettered … well, when such a turnabout comes to pass, how exactly does one explain the anonymity of the burglar, of the hooded Klansman, of the Internet scribe composing screeds urging holy war against the infidel who reads?

Furthermore, how does one explain it to the children of the community?

Barring the sad reality of a pathetic eagerness to see their children grow into adulthood with the same paucity of opportunity as their parents, doomed to trod the same desperate paths of futility, and in all likelihood to abandon the flawed community that their quarreling elders are so reluctant to change, the parents had best begin trying to come up with an answer beyond being mad as hell and using their anger as an excuse to pillage and harass.

That’s because although being mad as hell may sound cutely cinematic, it may well also encourage the less endowed and less principled among us into committing acts of criminal lawlessness, and if that happens, the hateful provocateurs igniting the fuse are just as responsible for the consequences as the expendable underlings throwing the bomb.

At the same time, there are few spectacles in human affairs quite as sadly predictable, and somehow eerily fascinating, as the implosion and collapse of a soul rotted from within.

I feel some degree of pity for the ones who collapse from the weight of addictions and struggles that overwhelm the powers of human reason and personal restraint with which they were gifted at birth.

But no pity need be spared for the pernicious elements, for the looters, for the practitioners of lawlessness, or for the people amongst us whose vendetta against the powers of human reason is manifested by wielding hatred as a means of control.

Maybe that’s the best way to explain it.