Been slowing learning the details of the rioting in London, and been talking about it with some friends, some British, some not, and it’s brought a lot of thoughts to mind about how these sort of things can happen, and what they mean.
A lot of people are wondering what the hell happened to make a whole generation of young people willing to riot like this. The news is full of interviews with rioters displaying their extraordinarily ugly vocabulary, mindset, stupidity, ignorance, and general vileness.
It’s easy and natural to lay it all at these people’s feet, and a lot of people are going to be drawing the wrong sort of conclusions as to what makes someone like that.
“Oh, we were too soft of them!” people will say. “Obviously, what these young people need is more harshness and cruelty in their lives, that always makes people more civilized. ”
It’s the shortest distance out of really thinking about things, and the quickest route to the fun of good deep righteous punitive anger. String them up! Yeah!
After all, chavs, and their equivalents worldwide, are horrible on nearly every level. They seem almost designed to make middle class people recoil in horror. There is little difference between the people rioting in London and the ones entertaining the masses on Jersey Shore every week.
But if we do not want these things to occur again, or spread to our own shores, we have to ask ourselves how people get like that. How do you get these ignorant, angry, ugly, stupid, senseless, violent people in the first place? What made them like that?
I have seen these people in my own home town, and talked to them, and thought about their lives and how they ended up like that, and I think I know.
Many people will blame government assistance, and in a sense they are right, but not in the simple-minded punitive rageful way they think. The problem is the long-term dependance that necessitates the assistance in the first place.
Being unemployed is depressing. Depression makes people less capable of work. Chronic unemployment in a region simply intensified this cycle. People lose the ability to hope for work or even to think of themselves as capable of work.
Long enough on public assistance, and they, being human beings, adjust to their new existence. You can only hope for a job for so long before that hope has to die before it kills you. And when that vital link to society known as work is gone, people lose their ability to cope. Human beings have a deep, driving need to take their place in society. When society says “We have no place for you, here’s a check, go away” it causes a kind of pain that drives people crazy in a very nasty, deep way.
The drive and intelligence dies in them, or is focused on the one form of advancement by merit left open to them, namely finding new and innovative ways to scam more money out of the system. Hope dies, and with it, the ability to progress as a person.
This is bad enough when it happens to adults with life experience to fall back on, memories of times when they were accepted into society and made to feel useful.
But if the problem persists, said adults raise children who inherit this profound lack of hope, who have never lived in a working family, and who grow up in the resulting milieu of drug use, alcoholism, sexual excess, domestic violence, abuse, and all the other horrible results of chronic poverty and unemployment.
When people can’t find work, they can’t grow up. It’s truly that simple. And so they end up suspended in a perpetual angry adolescence, filled with rage they don’t know how to name at a society they know is to blame but can’t explain how.
Society failed them. That doesn’t make them any less responsible for their crimes, but it does lead to a possible solution.
We have to recognize, as a society, as a globe, that chronic unemployment is an emergency-level problem. People going jobless for a long time is a crisis that goes far beyond simply feeding and clothing them.
We have allowed the system to collect these people with the best of intentions, but without the understanding and vision to know that what people need is not just cash, but work.
Hire them. Put them to work. And not just “dig a hole and fill it up” work, get them doing something with visible results, something where they can feel a sense of accomplishment, like they earned their paycheck by contributing to society.
FDR had the right idea. Public works. Those men built things people would use for generations, things that are still in use today.
Sure, some of them will balk at first. They are terrified to hope that they can actually have a place, a real place, in society. They have grown used to the sad life of the unemployed. They see attempts to get them to work as attempts to make them grow up.
And they are right.
But it’s the only cure. And in the long run, it is far cheaper to put them to work than to put them in jail.
We just have to be willing to see past our anger and disgust, slow down our urge to punish and control, and address the real problem.
People need work. And when the private sector fails them, the public must step in.