This is the result.
I can't stress enough how much I think young people generally have legitimate grievances.
They do, they absolutely do. But it's the part where they're so disconnected from society, so disaffected, and so disenfranchised, that hurting and damaging the communities many of them live in* seems like a super idea that just shakes me.
And when people act like this, the gulf between them and people who might have been sympathetic, and people who actually have the power to change the status quo, gets bigger and bigger.
Just had such an unexpected and fascinating conversation with a patron of the chippy around the corner (since Tesco was shut in anticipation of rioting, I guess) - an actual conversation that talked about the rioting in terms of issues rather than shoot the bastards. It was refreshing.
How will average people be able to get over what has been done to them? How will these rioters and looters be able to get back to some semblance of normality? What's the conversation that comes next, the - and I hate this word - the dialogue?
How the hell do we bridge this gulf and prevent it from happening again, 30 years from now.
* Catherine just made a really valid point on her blog via a Guardian article that in fact these people don't feel part of any community - so they're not damaging their own.
3 comments:
My mind keeps going backwards and forwards on this. I keep arguing myself out of different opinions. Disgusting criminal behaviour, opportunistic criminal behaviour, don't politicise it.
But the political issues made it easier for this situation to happen.
But, not everyone who is in a terrible economic situation goes on the rampage, so there is an element of sheer badness to it all.
And then, arrgh, I'm back to politics and psychology behind the riot.
Making myself crazy.
I know what you mean. If it helps at all, I think that whether or not you class it as a political problem - hell, whether or not the people rioting would class it as a political problem - there still have to be political solutions.
Political and cultural solutions. Because those are the only tools we have in the box that can do anything that stretches beyond the immediate punishment of specific individuals, and has a shot at, as you say, heading off the same riots in 30 years' time.
I'm really torn on where the dialogue can possibly go next. Like you said, people are legitimately angry about what's been done to their communities, and it's going to be very difficult to sell any kind of help for these disaffected kids as anything other than a concession. And weirdly, this might be where the apolitical nature of the riots is an advantage - the rioters aren't making political demands, so the government doesn't have to decide, on the spot, whether to give in to them. It gives the government breathing space between punishing the rioters and helping ease the situation that led to the riots.
Beyond that, the only thing I can see at this point is funding and strengthening frontline services, and learning to use the expertise of NGOs that have proven to be effective (like Kids' Company) without just abdicating responsibility to those NGOs. Oh, and a real shift in the way we talk about the economy. We need to acknowledge that even if we hike up the GDP again and create X new jobs, if those jobs aren't accessible to the people most desperate for them, it's not enough.
Thanks for the shoutout to my blog, btw. :)
Political and cultural solutions.
And these really do go hand in hand.
I must say, I don't think an e-petition to cut people's benefits is the most perfect solution I've ever heard. It's a very predictable reaction though...
Post a Comment