Fun!
Just another blog mentioning the UK riots (or more precisely, lootings) and I doubt I have anything more intelligent to say about it than anyone else.
I lived in England for three and a half years and though the reasons I left were several, most of them personal, two of the biggest were that I didn’t feel safe in England (even in relatively posh Brighton) and that I couldn’t stand the idea of raising a child in there.
Ok, so I’m from Canada, a country not known for it’s violence, but I am also, more specifically, from Toronto, the Urban Capitol of the country and far larger than either of the UK cities I lived in, with a greater range of ethnic diversity. My point is, I’m not some village girl terrified by urban environments. I grew up thinking about the routes from one place to another that would be least likely to bring me into contact with agressive panhandlers, drug dealers and prostitutes. In England though, it was always the teenagers that scared the crap out of me.
I experienced being on a full bus with teenagers playing loud music or even smoking pot and not a person there did anything about it. The reason? They were afraid. And I honestly don’t blame them, I was afraid too. The one time I saw someone ask, very politely if a young woman would turn their music down, they were immediately set upon by three young women who got in the gentleman’s face, poking him, swearing at him and threatening him until he simply got off.
I went from working at a scrappy urban school in the North whose students were universally poor, and largely Muslim, Pakistani first-generation immigrants, to a fairly priviledged upper-middle-class school down South where the majority of the children were white and had very different problems from their Northern bretheren.
In fact one of the only similarities between the kids from the North and those from the South was that whatever their scholastic abilities they all knew, without hesitation, their ‘rights’. They knew their was nothing any teacher or other adult could do to them, they knew that they had the power. However, the kids from the North, underpriviledged, often with parents who wouldn’t even have sent them to school if they didn’t legally have to, almost never brought this up. They might argue with you a little bit, but in they end they would do what you asked, accept adult authority and just get on with it. The kids in the South were more likely to threaten to tell their parents on you, or the principal and this was a serious threat.
I’m not even sure what my point is exactly, it isn’t that the North or the South are better or worse, I never really bought into that distinction anyways. I suppose I just mean I wasn’t surprised by the looting that took place in London and other cities. Most of the kids I knew who were told ‘no’ knew that the no was only temporary and eventually their parent would get tired and give in or the other authority figures they were dealing with would have to relent and allow them their ‘rights’.
Check out the various articles at www.thebrowser.com for a more coherent explanation. This site presents articles from the left, the right and everywhere in between so you can find some balance. It’s a great site by the way….
Rambling done
Blood-Touched 