Looters

This past Wednesday, as the situation in New Orleans was rapidly degenerating, eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson was stuck at the Superdome, where he heard people talking about possibility of an imminent mass evacuation to the Astrodome in Houston. However, there were no buses and no one around with enough authority to verify the story.

Venturing out of the dome, Gibson either found or already knew the location of a parked schoolbus. It's unclear whether keys were left in the vehicle, or whether he hotwired it. In either case, once he had it running he quickly packed it with 100 of the displaced, all of them total strangers to him, and headed for the Texas border.

Gibson's purloined bus was the first to arrive at the Astrodome, where Houston city officials, caught flat-footed by the unanticipated load of refugees, wouldn't let the vehicle through the stadium gates. It had no authorization.

There was a long, hot delay, during which kids stuck their heads out the bus windows and mothers tried to comfort their crying babies. Eventually, the crowd on board was allowed into the Astrodome, but Gibson was informed that he was probably in big trouble.

"I just took the bus and drove all the way here...seven hours straight," Gibson admitted. "I hadn't ever drove a bus." The teenager showed no apparent remorse for what he'd done, and his passengers were unanimously grateful.

"It's better than being in New Orleans," said one passenger, Albert McClaud. "We want to be somewhere where we're safe."

"I dont care if I get blamed for it ," Gibson said, "as long as I saved my people."

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Meanwhile, cartoonist Dan Wasserman of the Boston Globe has the best commentary I've seen yet on the topic of looting.