Two notable features of the recent round of riots wrecking havoc across the UK is the complete lack of remorse among the rioters, and the lack of any sort of overriding cause to the disorder other than the fact they could get away with it.
Both can be seen on display in this interview with two Manchester rioters, who said they were doing it because they could get away with it, and would continue doing it until they were caught.
This essay analyzes the rioters with depressing familiarity:
If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.
Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.
They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
[snip]
A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.
The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.
[snip]
Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.
They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.
The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.
Read the whole thing.
I want to point out that the above comes from that most derided of British newspapers, The Daily Mail. Disdain for The Daily Mail runs high from liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. But those who follow (even casually) its steady diet of stories on England’s cultural decline, and the rising incidents of casual violence from England’s permanent dole underclass, the recent riots are sad, but hardly shocking. Month after month, year after year, The Daily Mail has been reporting on the nature of those who have been rampaging through the streets these last few days. For political reasons, tony British liberals, safe in their secure upscale neighborhoods, have been disinclined to listen to those reports.
So which newspaper do you think more adequately reflects the reality of the English underclass? The Guardian, or The Daily Mail?