BURN, BABY, BURN REVISITED

I think I was premature in a recent blog when I quoted W.B. Yeats: “Things fall, apart, the centre cannot hold”. After watching TV and seeing the newspapers reporting the devastation of London and other major cities in Britain by the vicious mobs, I think the quotation is even more apt now. Scenes of total anarchy fill global television sets, I’m sure, by now. My wife and I are lucky enough to be in a smaller town on the southeast coast, Eastbourne, and so far we are unscathed.

It reminds me of the late sixties at the time of civil rights turmoil when major cities like Detroit and Los Angeles were beset by the mobs with fires and looting. Anarchy is never justified; revolution and protest, yes, under compelling circumstances---but never berserk frenzied mob rule. That is what Great Britain has been experiencing these last few nights.

The police are suffering from an image problem. So much emphasis in the last twenty-five years has been on stressing community relations, cultural and racial sensitivity and trying to seem like nice guys that in a trauma such as now they don’t have the respect for authority among the multi-cultural sections of London and the other big cities, who have only seen spasmodic acts of authority on the part of the police, especially the young.

Many factors contribute to this anarchy. Britain is in a period of increasing austerity with cost of living high, unemployment, as well, and a general paranoia that the system is against the disadvantaged. The Conservative government is trying to limit welfare expense and to undo a system that has frequently made it better to be unemployed and collect a benefit check than to look for a job. In tough times, the general resentment is aimed at anyone in charge.

Then add in another surefire ingredient to guarantee trouble: lack of familial authority. How many of these kids have only a single parent, who spends a good part of life, if she (or he) is lucky, working? Without or with a minimum of parental guidance, kids flock together and look for things to do, quite often involving trouble. Today, in an age of sophisticated digital communication with countless ways to stay in touch, to reach increased number of people, it is so easy to spark mass action. The word spread from one enclave of rioting and looting to many more pockets of discontent where new recruits could eagerly and quickly be recruited into action.

Somehow a respect for the authority of police has to be re-emphasized and restored. As one columnist put it, we have to have a police force, not a police service. Right now, the prime minister has told the police to get out there in maximum numbers, and 16,000 were on the streets of London last night. I don’t advocate in normal times the use of water cannons, but it is time for their use and a good blast of tear gas, as well.

The whole horror story is crystallized in the House of Reeves, a furniture business in the Clapton area of London where five generations of the Reeves family had earned a living since 1867. The Reeves had survived in three centuries, through two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the London Blitz. Rioters burned it to the ground two nights ago. They could not loot it because furniture is too big to carry any distance, so to hell with the Reeves, burn it down.

Sounds of the sixties---burn, baby, burn. It is not the answer. A new legion of youth needs to learn that fact.



P.S. After I wrote this blog, today I saw the headlines: an eleven year old boy, a well-educated young woman of nineteen and a thirty-one year old male teaching assistant were among those arraigned. Go figure!