What would you have done?

"Fish are friends, not food." - Bruce (Finding Nemo)

October 12, 1972 - A small turboprop passenger plane left Montevideo, Urguay, bound for Santiago, Chile. On the flight were fifteen members of a rugby team, with twenty-five of the player's family members and friends. Adverse weather conditions had created heavy turbulence, which had the pilots worried. Eventually the pilots set down in Argentina, and tried to wait out the storm. The next day conditions had improved slightly, and grudgingly the pilots decided to chance the flight to Chile. Disaster stuck when the plane hit an "air pocket" and lost 3,000ft of altitude. This caused the plane to collide with a mountain, lose its right wing, and crash into a valley. 

The survivors, twenty-seven of the original forty passengers found themselves in a frozen hell, with next to no food, little fuel for fire, and slim chance of rescue. As starvation and hunger set in "the survivors' spirits seemed to be sucked into a hopeless pit". This issue was compounded by the fact that the search for them had been called off, and it was now up to them to survive. This put the surviving passengers in a serious predicament, for with no hope of rescue members of the party would have to leave the crash site in order to get help, but without food the party would not make it far. As hunger won out, the survivors eventually began a systematic consumption of the deceased members of the crash. This process started very slowly, with small slivers of meat. Eventually, all the passengers were eating human flesh, and even cooking it over small fires. One of the passengers justified this by saying, "The soul was gone ... and the body was simply meat - essential to survival". The strongest of the survivors were sent out, after regaining their strength, to find rescue, and before Christmas had arrived this atrocious incident was over. 

In this event I see a Interactionism at its finest, for a normally accepted "rule" is thrown out because of a changing social dynamic. Ask any child and they will tell you that humans are not for eating, it has been long established that humans simply do not eat other humans. This is due to bountiful food sources, stemming from our modern agrarian society. Replace that society with one in which there are no food stores and no way of acquiring food, and suddenly your best friend looks like a good source of energy. By itself, a human body has no intrinsic meaning, however we have learned through society "that a body, while not a person, is still human, and must be treated with respect". This can be seen in funerals, for even though a person no longer occupies that body, we still perceive it as human and give it the utmost respect. 

A live human body and a deceased human body have the same number of particles. Structurally there's no difference. - Jon Osterman (Watchmen)

Due to the changed social dynamic in the Andes incident, the standards of this society can be shifted by its members. This was demonstrated by the member of the survivors who initially suggested the eating of human flesh. He sought to change a rule, due to this societies' needs. Initially, this was not widely accepted beyond his close friends, but as more and more people saw the act of eating humans become "acceptable" they too joined in. This demonstrates how our society is constructed of unspoken rules, that if a need arises can easily be manipulated.

  
This principle can be seen in the Egyptian Protests. A neglectful, power-hungry, and abusive regime overstepped its bounds too many times. This angers many of the countries citizens, many of whom are young, educated, and harmed by this government. Over a long span of time, it becomes acceptable to be angry at the government, first in private and then, openly. As this discontent it networked, over facebook and twitter, Egypt's youth are at a boiling point. Citizens begin openly gathering, then protesting, and eventually begin rioting and looting. Under normal circumstances, this behavior would be unacceptable, but given the slow progression up of the situation one can see how it developed. A large gap exists between thoughts of discontent and rioting against law enforcement officials. This gap was slowly bridged, over the course of several years. So it became more and more acceptable to harbor this actions. As, others saw these acts, they only served to make those normally unacceptable ideas, such as rioting, appear the status quo. This made it easy for others to join in on the widespread destruction, leaving the situation as it stands today.