#oneaday Day 61: All Mouth and No Trousers

It’s been a bit of a funny day. Went out to the gym earlier, all well and good, then came home to an email from said gym saying that they were closing at 4pm due to the potential for “protests” later in the evening.

I have, of course, heard about the wave of racist riots that have been breaking out in various places across the nation recently, but somehow you never think of it happening close to you. So I won’t lie, I was a little bit concerned — even if with our position on the outskirts of the city proper, we were unlikely to see anything particularly untoward happening.

Looking through the local newspaper’s coverage of the evening’s happenings, what appears to have happened is that several hundred anti-racism counter-protestors turned up in the town centre where the racists were rumoured to be gathering, and found themselves confronted with maybe four or five actual racists. So I think we’re probably okay here.

What I did find funny, however, was the comments section underneath the local paper’s reporting on the situation, which almost entirely looked like this:

A comment thread from the Daily Echo newspaper's website, consisting entirely of comments marked "This comment has been removed because it breaks our rules".

Looking at this — and scrolling down the many, many pages of it — really drove something home: while foul and odious people with noxious viewpoints most certainly do exist in this day and age, and that is something we as a society are going to have to deal with in some way, a significant proportion of them aren’t willing to actually go and do anything beyond typing some impotently angry comments into their computer.

This, of course, isn’t to downplay the very real and very serious situations that have occurred elsewhere, but I am not at all surprised to see that the rumours of riots breaking out all across the country turned out to be exaggeration and/or misinformation. I’ve seen far too many examples of “keyboard warriors” over the course of the last decade or so to believe that many of them will actually take to the streets and start real trouble — and that’s probably for the best.

Of course, you can still cause plenty of trouble from your computer chair through harassment, doxxing and suchlike — and believe me, having been on the receiving end of both, I know exactly how unpleasant and scary it can be — but at least these impotent, red-faced, gurning idiots aren’t out there breaking windows, setting fire to things and inflicting real injuries — or worse — on innocent people. So we should probably be thankful for small mercies.

I suspect the country as a whole isn’t out of this dangerous period it’s in, but at least the potential worry for this evening is seemingly over and done with for now. So I guess now we wait and see how long it takes for things to return to whatever passes for “normal” these days.

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#oneaday Day 569: It’s All Kicking Off

“It’s all kicking off.” A phrase which now represents the recent riots that have been taking place around the UK.

I’m not going to use this as a means of making some sort of political comment on the whole thing, because as a normal human being and a law-abiding citizen, frankly I don’t care on the political aspect of it — if there even is one. What I do care about is that people in this country have the capacity to go completely batshit mental and smash the shit out of absolutely everything, then set fire to it just to make sure it’s good and properly destroyed.

A piece on the BBC earlier summed up pretty much what I think about the whole thing — a growing culture of consumerism, materialism and a sense of misplaced entitlement among young people is highly likely to blame. Evidence of it is everywhere, and as an ex-teacher I frequently came face to face with the kind of behaviour which, left unchecked, could (and did) escalate into something altogether more sinister.

Parents do need to take more responsibility for their children and be able to tell them “no” rather than pandering to their whims. In the first school I taught in, the most unpleasant child in the class would never turn up to his detentions because, I quote, “Mum says I don’t have to do detentions”. In the face of such defiance from not only the child but the parents too, what exactly is the educational system expected to do in order to instil a sense of “good citizenship” in these little scruttocks?

It’s not all kids, of course, but any time an event like this comes along — particularly one of this magnitude — it’s easy to quickly decry all children and teenagers as “feral” and start advocating increasingly Draconian societal measures. That’s possibly not the answer, as it would likely lead to even greater social unrest — unrest which the previously “nice” kids might feel compelled to join in on.

What is a problem is the gang culture that is growing and spreading in our towns. When I worked in retail in Southampton, we used to have an almost constant gang presence in the store thanks to the fact that we offered, in effect, free Internet access. Hordes of youths in hoodies, ill-fitting trousers tucked into socks and several tons of cheap “gold” jewellery frequently spent the best part of a day in the store, intimidating staff and customers alike, until we got to a stage where enough was enough and we had to start taking tougher action.

The presence of these individuals was enough to be intimidating, but then you looked at what they were doing online. Most of them made use of the social networking site “Bebo” at the time, and most of them were on there “repping” whatever gang they happened to come from around the city. In some ways, it was sort of hilariously pathetic, as these kids boasted about how hard they were, how excellent their rapping was (spoiler: it wasn’t very excellent) and how badly they were going to “murk” their rivals from the next postcode over. But on the other hand, the obsession with guns, violence and materialism coupled with severely short tempers was somewhat sinister — and it made running across these individuals outside a disturbing, unpleasant experience. And they knew it.

The scariest thing about these riots is seeing that the people that I fear are capable of scary shit. Having your fears justified only makes them more scary.

At the time of writing, at least, things do seem to be calming down a bit. I hope this momentary madness passes and the devastated communities affected by the chaos can regroup, rebuild and move on. And that the scumbags responsible are brought to swift and humiliating justice.

#oneaday, Day 161: Shouting and Screaming

So England went out of the World Cup today. I’m not going to gloat about that, my feelings on football are well-known and well-documented. What I did want to speak about was how the whole experience made me feel as an outsider who wasn’t watching it and could only hear things.

I was terrified. There is nothing else that you hear in relatively “everyday” life that matches the ferocity of someone shouting at football. When it’s the World Cup or even a European tournament and England are involved, you know who’s watching it, because you can hear something which sounds remarkably like a Spartan army blaring out of their living room. Combine that with those stupid vuvuzelas which everyone claims to be playing ironically and you’ve got a not-terribly pleasant noise for a mild-mannered gent such as myself.

Couple this with the sheer rage shown by people over a disallowed England goal (fair enough, from what I could see from reports after the fact) and you have a large proportion of a nation already fond of binge drinking and casual violence set to explode.

All credit, though, after the match happened, I didn’t hear much in the way of shouting, screaming or violence. I didn’t even hear that many police cars go past. That said, the vast majority of the fans would have been further into the town centre, which is a little further away from me. You could not have paid me to walk into town after the match had finished. Maybe I wouldn’t have been assaulted, shouted at or anything. But it’s a risk that I wasn’t willing to take.

Several thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, anarchists are rioting in Toronto. Canadians don’t riot. They certainly don’t set fire to police cars and smash shit up. I can’t even begin to imagine how frightening the experience must be for them if I don’t want to leave my house while a bloody football match is going on. I’ll confess to not having paid much attention to the news for the last few days as I’ve had a huge amount of other things on my mind, so I’m not even entirely sure what the riots are about. I could look it up but it’s terribly late. Whatever they’re about, they’re still fucking riots. Those are never good, right?

It’s been a funny day all round really. It’s kind of passed me by, almost. I wrote my articles from my trip earlier, so those should be popping up online very soon all being well. Suffice to say they will be all over Twitter, Digg, N4G and the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox when they are up.

And then tomorrow? Who knows. Each new day is a mystery right now, a face-down card waiting to reveal whatever Fate is going to throw me next. Technically it’s after midnight now, so I should be able to look at the card. But I tend not to find out what it is until the most inconvenient moment.

God-dammit.