Re: London - riots
I worked a lot with some community members (ex-gang members and some current gang members) in South and South-East London. We would visit council estates most of the time and have talks and door-to-door visits to talk with the youth, their families and such like. Most of the time there was no 'family'. You'd have children being raised by their 'tough' cousins or 'tough' uncles/aunts or such like. No role models to look up to, nothing to say the least. That is the issue.
Interesting. How long, where did you work and with which organization? And what was work exactly?
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Yeah, there was oppression, exclusion, etc
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There we go. Many of the things you go onto write about are directly resulting from this.
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... at some point in time but now its all about lack of strong role models, the desire to get easy money, pathetically sissy legislation and general culture.
The reason most youngsters gave us were they wanted to make money. Apparently making money to them means hustling and not doing work that is dignified. They crave power and control, that was the jist of it.
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General culture doesnt emerge from nothing. The desire to get money is not a trait limited to Brixton and Haringey. Materialism and consumerism is the language of the culture in general. The 'easy' impulse arises from the oppression/exclusion aspects you mentioned earlier. There is no non-easy way to live the life you and me might have access to by getting city jobs if their future prospects include working retail and in chicken shops as you say.
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They have been given enough chances to sort their lives out. The UK literally wipes your arse if you're a citizen. If millions of people can choose to work as chicken-shop assistants, supermarket trolley collectors, weekend market stall salespersons, etc... why can't these yobs pick that? Simply because they want more, they crave more and so it goes on and on. You get JSA, you get education, you get vocational courses, you get a bloody PC system that won't say a word and yet you run about wreaking havoc like this? Piss poor excuses for anything.
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All I can say is going through these neighbourhoods, and I happen to live close enough to have to pass through one every day, I do not see a lifestyle that says indulgence. For all the arse wiping you list, I can see a difference as clear as day between the lifestyle these people have, and that of those who are a part of the good society. Be that in terms of educational and professional opportunities or in terms of material possessions or in terms of standard of living.
Lets remember that injustice is always a sliding scale. At the time of the french revolution, the aristocrat who said 'Let them eat cake' could rightly have said look these peasants are so much better off than our grandparents kept them, or they are so much better off than the slaves we ship off to Africa. And they would have been right. But they still got their heads chopped off.
As for millions of people working, how do you know that those rioting dont have those kindof minimal wage jobs? It is speculation to say these are just unemployed people.
