Yesterday morning a tragic accident occurred in Yerevan, the truck driver died. The truck was carrying food, the sacks of which were found on the ground. Lragir.am noticed and recorded that a woman picked up and carried one of the sacks, saying, “No matter, everyone is taking”.
Comments; “Where did they lead the poor people?”, “People are longing for a sack of pasta”, “Authorities serve a bad example, they steal and the people steal”.
Let’s talk about those “sighs” in sequence. During the 1988 earthquake, when the grief and tragedy were thousand times bigger, people, residents of the Soviet Armenia, were not engaged in looting? Did not they enter the ruined houses and took what they considered valuable? Weren’t those people hungry?
Or in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, were not there bandits who did the same thing? Whether Americans are “longing for a piece of bread” or they expressed their particular protest against the George W. Bush Junior policy by engaging in banditry. Maybe robbers enter abandoned residential buildings, shops, and hospitals because the Bush administration was a bad example for them.
So the level of morality of the society is not conditioned by the material state, the regime, the authorities, and the rest of the things. There are thousands of people in Armenia and millions of them in the world who live dozens, hundreds of times worse than a woman who is carrying a macaroni sack, but consider it below their dignity to pick up a scratch from the ground and put in a pocket. One can live in a hut and be happy, can live in a three-story house and envy a neighbor with a four-storey private house justifying their own crimes with others’ bigger crimes.
People are almost the same everywhere, there are dignified, decent people everywhere, and there are also those who are engaged in looting. I say “almost” because I assume that in Japan, for example, during the disaster, people do not behave like they do in Armenia or in the USA (maybe I am wrong). But societies, however, have their own peculiarities. Our society loves so called pouring “ash on the head” and explain every kind of ugly action in terms of “regime”, authorities, geographical location and the unfortunate destiny of the Armenian people. Americans would hardly get so “deeply”.
Yesterday, the most read material of Aravot.am was the information about the phenomenon of cannibalism in Krasnodar which was neither fresh, nor our exception. That “preference” is something like a looting.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
