Most people by now should be aware of the violence and arson that occurred in London recently, spread over multiple days. Both the rioting, triggered by the police shooting of an armed man they were arresting, and the sweeping destruction, which followed it, cooked up for the feast of self-centred apathy and opportunism that participants gorged themselves on. Photos of the burning streets and ashen car wrecks can be found all over the internet – such as here – and show some evidence of the cost of the long hours. What haunted me the most wasn’t the smoke, the exploding shop-fronts, the debris or the terrified children. It was the complete pointlessness of these actions and the endangerment they caused. This wasn’t a true protest. None of it was an effective bite back at a hypothetical system full of abuse. It wasn’t a last stand for personal defence in a war of ideologies that had escalated tragically. Witnessing these photos calls to mind images from films like Children of Men: a city of hollowed out car shells, of simple but practical explosive cocktails and of urban youth militias formed for reasons of bland angry self-interest. The other night, I came across a few clips of the action as it unfolded. One of them, following this link, shows a student on the street, back against a wall, bleeding, probably frightened and apparently without help nearby. A small group of random strangers appear to come to his aid and help the man up to his feet – only to take this as an opportunity to steal from the young man’s now exposed backpack and walk away.
There’s an expectation, at least in the democratic Western world, that large-scale, unlawful, fiery acts are intrinsically attached to firm, deep-seeded, life-affirming cultural demonstrations; such as political revolutions, clashing religious ideologies, self-preservation amidst war, etc. This expectation probably comes from Hollywood and us being raised by its sweeping vigilante battles for Truth, Justice and the “American way”. It’s something of a let-down to find all of this primal chest-beating and Molotov-cocktail-throwing being purely for reasons of snatching a free mobile phone or TV (although, maybe it shouldn’t be, since super cheap electrical goods does sound like at least part of an “American way”). The self-confessed pointlessness, the lack of even delusions of moral victories to be had, is the most disappointing, I think. The private property damage and hospitalisations, alongside this, is flat-out disgusting.
The most shocking lesson for me as a young teenager was that adulthood, outside of simple legal distinctions, effectively means nothing. Before then, I had always lived under the assumption that, upon growing up, the mess of childhood bullshit would be left behind. An assumption that, while some people may not be educated as well as others or might have vastly different areas of expertise or needs, that, deep down, adults at least always told the truth as they understood it, that pettiness, lying for the sake of lying and purposeful victimisation were purely a symptom of a child’s mind. The knowledge that those things never go away and that adulthood only makes people more influential and more capable of these things than they were earlier was, perhaps, the second most perspective altering lesson I ever had. What may be in first place didn’t really come to me until I was a young man and it’s this: many people live under the assumption of cultural and/or moral improvements being made over centuries (or, at least, broad changes subjectively seen as “improvements”). We make exclamations, for example, of our surprise that same-sex marriage is not uniformly legal in an advanced time like 2011. And it’s true that each successive generation is more informed medically and scientifically than the previous one. However, one day – if our species is still alive – it will be the year 3011 but, as far as our behaviour shows, it will be no different than our Bronze Age, so many thousands of years ago. And that might never change.
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