We all read into this what we want to see. Via Facebook, media opinion and general consensus the UK riots (now possibly entering their fifth night), have become the inkblot in what one American reporter called this nations Rorschach test.
The seers of the right see the rise of gangs in schools, poor parenting, and a cowardly police force as sole candidates for cause, labeling the looters as “scum” rising from the gutters to take their HDTV and money for nothing. Cameron reduces this to “criminality” of course; otherwise (heaven forbid) it would be his fault.
To the left, opinions scapegoat police brutality, social inequality, budget cuts and the death of further public education.
Nothing is truly new here.
Truth is, it is extremely difficult to get a perspective on this situation because a. It is still happening and b. It is happening on our doorsteps. That is why I found it really interesting to read one American reporter declare, “if the Egyptians in Tahrir Square wanted democracy, and the anarchists in Athens wanted more government spending, the hooded men in British streets want 46-inch flat-screen HD televisions.”
On the surface, as the world is watching, this is how it seems. The kids throwing missiles have no slogans, no motives, and no apparent social agenda to drive their adolescent anarchy. But as Dr Martin Luther King said “a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.”
There is a time long before now when we all should have started listening, paying more attention, asking ourselves why our children have evolved into such anger.
More than a fifth of our teenagers are functionally illiterate due to the disgrace that masquerades as our public education system. Compare this statistic to a recent comment tweeted by a Waterstone’s manager in central London that declared his business would remain open because “if they stole books they may learn something.” (Brunel would struggle to build a bridge over this social divide.)
I say, if they had a government who cared about them enough to ensure that every child got a thorough and decent education and a future that they could sculpt into anything they desired, (no matter how rich their parents were) we would learn something.
This glib snobbery is exactly the kind of comment that illuminates the middle classes fear of everything they do not comprehend or wish to share. Do people even want to understand (let alone show compassion) for others who may not be as fortunate as they are?
We have a generation of young people entitled to more, denied the means of ever finding jobs and therefore dependant on government handouts. Trapped in a system that neither cares about their plight, nor gives them any opportunity to escape, are we surprised that when the opportunity came, they helped themselves? (Especially considering the attitudes shown above towards them.)
Whether they were grabbing TV’s, trainers or any other form of technology is completely irrelevant. They took it because conventional ways of entering the commercial mainstream have all been closed down to them. Many disgusted pundits commentated on how rioters looked like they were having a “good time and enjoying themselves” while ransacking local and national stores in their communities across London.
Let’s compare this to the good time they have when police stop and search them for having nothing more than black skin and a legitimate reason to get somewhere fast. Or the good time they have compared to the 145,612 millionaires currently living alongside them in London, two of which took three days to return from holiday to run the country and earn the luxury they could not seemingly bare to tare themselves away from.
Poor David…it really looked like he had been working hard on that tan too.
The London Olympics, due to be hosted in 2012, has a whopping 9.3bn budget – although many pundits now fear that it may not go ahead. Could that money have been spent wisely? If it had been spent wisely, in say development and creation of permanent jobs, investment into schools, health and further education potentials not to mention decent houses (instead of on running tracks and diving pools), would London have ever faced these troubles?
Is there any wonder so many of these kids are angry having nothing, while their government fragrantly wastes billions of pounds on luxuries that should not be afforded before peoples welfare? Need I mention the Millennium Dome Fiasco?
I by no means want to add to the sweeping political generalizations that try to sum up these riots. I am naturally rationalizing to make the terror governable in my own understanding.
The riots have brought my attention to what happens when we ignore the problem of inequality for too long, and we have witnessed a new phenomenon of youth revolt, mobile and technically adept at overthrowing a totally unprepared police force. These are utterly new times, beyond the comprehension of anything other than hindsight.
Whitehall may reconvene and the MET may be given the full force of the law to play with, but it is like pouring salt into the open wounds of the poorer communities in this country, as it is the hostility of our governments policies against the poor, police force and the pressures of our consumer culture that begat these riots in the first place. The most viscous of circles is spiraling out of control.
“The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment." Lyndon Johnson
My thoughts are with the communities affected by this violence and mayhem, and the families of the five men killed in these terrible events.
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