Fixing Feral Youth the Old-fashioned Way
My friends here in England have arrived home from a visit to Norway. They are hard at work again today, on this grey homecoming. But the fires, looting and mayhem have all died down and now we are in for an orgy of post-riots analysis, clattering along in the media. No doubt we will soon be mesmerized by the blame game. Mercifully there are only a handful of genuine, human, post mortems.
The friends left for their break in Norway just as the mad Norwegian Breivik wreaked his own personal havoc on his society and Norway dominated the news. And then we, in England, returned to medieval mode and mindsets. The pop song "London's Burning" came to mind. Copycat burning and looting broke out in towns and cities all over England to the accompaniment of new language: "recreational looting" and "criminality" as examples. We have been listening to the gargling, incomprehensible voices of feral youths, telling radio jockeys and TV interviewers how they view the damage to their modern cities and to the threatened or destroyed livelihoods of fellow citizens.
We know these "youths" had no prospects for the future before all this happened. Nobody has yet worked out how they can expect much improvement in their outlook now. The economic meltdown, both national and world wide, was not the main causative factor since the riotersbelieved that they had nothing to lose in behaving so lawlessly last week. In the wake of the damage they have done, it seems to me that they will have even less than nothing to lose as time goes on.
"Chinja!" (Change!), the war cry of my former, fellow Zimbabwean citizens opposed to the mad Mugabe regime, is the call needed here. But it does seem that the most urgent change over here in England should start at the bottom (teargas? water cannon? rubber bullets?) rather than at the top.
Diana Mitchell Copyright © 2004
The friends left for their break in Norway just as the mad Norwegian Breivik wreaked his own personal havoc on his society and Norway dominated the news. And then we, in England, returned to medieval mode and mindsets. The pop song "London's Burning" came to mind. Copycat burning and looting broke out in towns and cities all over England to the accompaniment of new language: "recreational looting" and "criminality" as examples. We have been listening to the gargling, incomprehensible voices of feral youths, telling radio jockeys and TV interviewers how they view the damage to their modern cities and to the threatened or destroyed livelihoods of fellow citizens.
We know these "youths" had no prospects for the future before all this happened. Nobody has yet worked out how they can expect much improvement in their outlook now. The economic meltdown, both national and world wide, was not the main causative factor since the riotersbelieved that they had nothing to lose in behaving so lawlessly last week. In the wake of the damage they have done, it seems to me that they will have even less than nothing to lose as time goes on.
"Chinja!" (Change!), the war cry of my former, fellow Zimbabwean citizens opposed to the mad Mugabe regime, is the call needed here. But it does seem that the most urgent change over here in England should start at the bottom (teargas? water cannon? rubber bullets?) rather than at the top.
Diana Mitchell Copyright © 2004
posted by Diana Mitchell | 8:16 PM
4 Comments:
Yes the looting in many cities was a moment of madness in British history!
I have just re-read my August 11 blog and have to withdraw my hasty view that the fault lies with the young. It is now known that most of the rioters were not representative of the youth of London but that there were many troublemakers who had previous convictions for various levels of crime or public disorder.
For my hasty indiscriminate condemnation of London's young people, I apologise. 20 September 2011
Perhaps you should think before you write in future. Not every young person in London is a criminal. It's disgusting to write articles like that when you are not even British yourself. Leave the British youth alone and get your facts correct in future.
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