So the kids of London from some of the most impoverished areas have been rioting the past three nights, they may continue to do so tonight or we might have seen the end of the rioting but it's doubtful.
Personally I wouldn’t go out smashing shops and looting goods from inside, and I am sure those reading this will be of the same thought but that probably where our agreements end.
When events such as rioting and looting occur we get pretentious characters jumping in the realms of the hegemonic hand of the Media who publish the sentiment that some people cannot get enough of. To paraphrase slightly...”look at those people how uncivilised, how can they do such a thing?” “Ferrell rats” “scum” and “blah blah bullshit”. Instead people should be looking to youtube, the Guardian, and blogs to find the pragmatic responses.
People espousing this patronising ill informed, un informed, contrived perception of the rioting would do well to sit down and have a good think about what circumstances that these kids have been living in to have brought them to act in a manner which is wrong, and harmful, not just for themselves but against all those whom their actions have affected. But this is the point! They don’t give a FUCK! Why?
Today the odds of one of the kids ever owning a house or having access to basic health care are slim to none. Those odds are reciprocated in my future prospects and I’ve had an over-exuberant education. So I don’t know what they must be thinking! Combine this with inadequate social housing; cramped living conditions in densely populated area common in London, surrounded by and involved in gang culture induce through fear. Some live in fear because they live in and around domestic abuse, drug abuse, and many will know of or know people who have been murdered. We all know the police may have unlawfully shot Mark Duggan and no one will be convicted but this is possibly the most horrific crime to have occurred in the past few days. Those who are supposed to uphold the law have violated the worst sanction of the Law and we all know that no one will be convicted! Fuck that! This scenario is more fucked up than kids on estates rioting. Fuck the IPCC!
Listen if you think that because you have never acted in the way these kids are doing and what they are doing is contemptuous and inexcusable, as Nick Clegg stated, then I would jester to you come live on an estate in and around deprivation, mass poverty and dire inequality. The other day I saw two women, Crack/Smack addicts, walking past my window, both completely out of it. One woman was heavily pregnant swaying all over with a can of strongbrew in one have and sucking furiously on a cigarette. What chance does her unborn baby have? To grow up as a young, very impressionable and in all likely hood scared child you may not grow up thinking that the violence we have seen this week is that strange.
Hale is a long way from this environment. If you have addictions you get rehab paid for, you ‘deserve’ a car at the age of 17, you get a student loan and invest it, holidays galore, and you struggle in school you get a tutor. You learn in school that plain and simple there is no excuse for looting and violence. Oh, your opinion is so culturally superior that one may call the rioters “Ferrel Rat” and ask “Where are the parents?” Their parents have probably given up.
If the government has removed funding for youth centres, charities who deal with troubled children, removed what little support school children got by way of EMA, reduced housing benefits, as a parent I would be distraught that my child is out looting whilst also of the opinion there is nothing for them to do. No money to go on holiday, kids camp, cinema, their too young to go to clubs, no support from the government demonised by society... FUCK IT let riot! I wouldn’t join in but I don’t blame them one bit!
The people who have been living in and around the rioting are scared but then again the rioters themselves are petrified also, with little to no future prospects the rioting is - a Crying out for help and role models.
Arresting and criminalising them all is the most stupid policy you can adopt think outside the box for one fucking minute... don’t you think that arresting kids they will grow up even further entrenched by crime, increasing the odds of their kids doing the same. DO give them community work and ask them why they really feel the need to do what they did, and invest in solutions.
People don’t commit crimes because they are criminals, no matter how paradoxical such sentiment is, they commit crime because they are forced into it through systemic social circumstances, eradicate these and then we will be some way towards solving the problem. Sweeping it under the carpet will give you a tumor.
Interesting to read your point of view. However, I do not agree with your arguments.
ReplyDeleteWhen I see these riots, two things always come to my mind. For my work at a development agency, I was in Sri Lanka last month. Poor people are the large majority there, and when you're poor there, you have absolutely nothing. People live in the street in improvised tents, they die of disease in their thirties, and they have no education at all. However, what do they do? They will take a small loan, maybe 20 dollars, buy a riksha, and work. Work work work their asses off. They just take every small change to improve their lives. After a few years, they might be able to buy a motorriksha, and maybe later even a car. Their children will get basic education and when one's sick, they can buy medicine. And slowly but steadily their lives improve through work and taking every chance you have in life. They take control of their own fate.
Second thing that comes to mind is similar. I always have to think sbout our grandparent's generation, the "Greatest Generation". They lived through the Great Depression, fought a war against a monstruous regime, and transformed a world of poverty and deprevation into a world of freedom and prosperity. Did they feel sorry for themselves? Did they surrender to self-pity and defeatistic
plundering? Don't think so. They were in the streets, wearing signs: will work for bread. Now that is an attitude that will get you further.
And now look at our so-called deprived fellow countrymen with their Blackberries (I did not have money for that until I had a proper job). Oh yes, we feel so sorry for them, they are so deprived. Very good that they make a statement by destroying the shops of lower middle class people that worked hard all their lives to build up a business Very good that they destroy everything in their neighbourhoods, very good to have absolutely no moral standards and very good to expect the government to solve all your problems.
It's time for them to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives. They should be ashamed of themselves, because they are a shame to the people living in real poverty in the third world, to the generation of our grandparents and for their own generation. The time of thinking you can take everything from the rich because they're rich and you're poor are over. Time to feel responsible for your own life. Time to act.
LOL. IHT today:
ReplyDelete"While many Britons had initially blamed the violence on unemployed youth, one surprise was the presence in courts of young men and women with regular jobs among the riot suspects lined up in police wagons outside courthouses in London and other cities. That raised questions about why they had been caught up in the kind of mayhem that has traditionally drawn on an underclass of alienated young people, with no jobs and few prospects.
Many of those who were remanded for trial appeared to come from just those kinds of backgrounds — evidence, as some commentators saw it, that the root causes of the disorders lay in social deprivation and despair. But those who stood before the courts for bail hearings in London, many of them still in their jeans and hooded sweatshirts, included a graphic designer, a postal employee, a dental assistant, a teaching aide, a forklift driver and a youth worker.
One 19-year-old woman was listed on court documents as living in a converted farmhouse in a leafy, upmarket area of rural Kent that is part of what Londoners call the stockbroker belt. A 22-year-old woman gave her address as an upscale block of flats in a gentrified neighborhood of Hackney, one of the worst-hit riot areas in London. Local residents said that many of the residents of the apartments, which are valued at about $500,000, belonged to a community of affluent, middle-class people with jobs in London’s news media and art world. "
@ Left wings
ReplyDeleteSo these guys are the opportunists... The suited looters, who would not start the riots but just jump on the band wagon of exploiting the situation...reminds me of MPs expenses!
The kids who started the riots were announcing a distorted political message, seen through a lack of a voice and with a fear, and rightly so, of the future!
Ferrell? Feral?
ReplyDeleteWe call the EDL rats, scum, etc. Why not these violent rioters, also terrorising ethnically diverse areas?