We don't need no stinkin moral absolutes.
Posted on 08/24/2007 7:35:21 PM PDT by LdSentinal
To read the newspapers this week was to wonder afresh what kind of country Britain has become and what kind of people we have turned into.
As 11-year-old Rhys Jones innocently kicked a football round the carpark of a Liverpool pub on Wednesday evening, he was shot in the neck by a teenager in a hoodie top, who then fled the scene on a BMX bike.
Rhys died there in the car park, cradled in the arms of his mother, Melanie.
Unsafe streets: Britain is plagued by a growing yob culture
Especially now, as children prepare to go back to school, the heartbroken words of Rhys's father, will shrivel every parent's heart.
"I went to his room where he should be asleep, opened his wardrobe, his school uniform that we have bought for for senior school, his pens and pencils, are there unopened. His calculator is there unopened, his shoes are still in the box, his trainers are still in the box."
Rhys's murder comes as we are still reeling from the story of young father-of-three Garry Newlove, who was kicked to death by a teenage gang outside his home in Warrington after trying to stop them vandalising his property.
Indeed, these horrific events come so thick and fast, and so surpass one another in pointless savagery, that their victims' names fade from the collective memory in days, even hours.
We still remember those like James Bulger, Stephen Lawrence or Damilola Taylor, whose deaths continue to haunt us. But there are innumerable others - equally horrific - that are just as quickly forgotten.
Who, other than their grieving friends and families, can name that boy who had an axe buried in his head as he walked through a Liverpool park? Or that beautiful woman jeweller, gunned down in her shop in Nottingham?
Or even the 14-year-old "bright child, who was never in trouble" who was knifed to death in a youth club in North London just two months ago?
It may seem callous to ask as much so soon after his murder, but can we be certain, six months from now, that we will remember the name of little Rhys Jones? Might not some even viler crime be filling the headlines and news bulletins?
Will it not be the turn of two other grief-stricken parents to stand before the cameras and plead for something - anything - to be done to halt such senseless killings?
Conservative leader David Cameron has spoken of "anarchy in the UK" and he gave a speech in which he blamed the rise in yobbish behaviour on ministers, feckless parents, mindless drinking and a benefits system that punishes stable families.
Despite the party-line huffing and puffing of former Home Secretary David Blunkett on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday, most people will agree that, for once, Cameron got it spot-on.
Read more...
Mother's tearful return to the spot where Rhys was gunned down
Twenty-odd years ago, I returned to live in Britain after spending 18 months in New York. I remember with what relief I left the Big Apple's supersized danger and hysteria for what seemed, by comparison, a quiet, wet, green little island in the Atlantic where nothing could really harm you.
While discovering the fundamental heartlessness of American life, I had appreciated, as never before, the ancient British qualities of selfcontrol, politeness and kindness. And, believe it or not, in the Eighties they were all still largely intact.
A few days after my homecoming, I remember stopping on a street in Central London, struck by how normal and civilised everyone looked.
All of which set me thinking this week about just how much our national character has changed over the past 20 years; how we have lost, or deliberately discarded, so many of the qualities which once made us unique in every positive way; how Britishness is increasingly equated with brutishness.
What we once watched in American films about New York's Lower East Side is now in our midst, wherever we live. (The estate where Rhys Jones died was previously considered a safe and harmonious one.)
Teenage gang warfare - of which Rhys was probably an innocent victim - and gun and knife-crime, are steeply on the rise, and admitted by the Government to be so, even as we are simultaneously assured that crime figures are "falling".
The hearts of major cities, even of once-tranquil country towns, are turned into no-go areas by drunken, rampaging hordes every weekend. Elderly people are afraid to venture out of their homes after dark.
The threat of mindless violence hangs over everyone who deals with the public, from shopkeepers, taxi-drivers and railway employees to schoolteachers and NHS workers.
This is not just paranoia. Paranoia is unjustified. But no one can say that the fear most Britons live in today is without reason - and everyone has their own story to tell.
On New Year's Eve two years ago, in our North London neighbourhood, a teenage boy had to be hospitalised after being beaten up. His crime? Calling out "Happy New Year" to a passing car.
My wife's hairdresser, a young man obviously too handsome for his own good, was recently attacked from behind without warning at a disco, and needed surgery for a broken jaw which put him off work for weeks.
"Yob culture" is said to be to blame - how any of this can be termed "culture" beats me.
But "yob" no longer just means a feral 17-year-old in a hoodie, taking revenge on society for his blighted life on some sink estate. Yobbery has ceased to be defined by age or gender or class and to be attributable to material deprivation or lack of education. It is the new British disease. It transcends ages, incomes, areas.
Last week, my family and I were staying at a small, quiet seaside hotel in northern Portugal where, until our last day, we were the only British guests.
Then the place was taken over by 50 sales reps from a wellknown UK brand-name, enjoying a jaunt at the company's expense.
Before even unpacking their cases, a large group established themselves by the pool and set about getting "hammered", "bladdered", "trashed" and "rata**ed" (there are so many new words for drunkenness) in the shortest time possible.
Obese males, already broiling medium-rare under the Portuguese sun, swigged beer from the bottle, swapped high-decibel dirty jokes, bragged about recent sexual exploits or bellowed into mobile phones.
Females showing too much bare flesh and too many tattoos shrieked with laughter at the wit of their menfolk and whooped in mock-terror as water from the pool was playfully sloshed over them or ice-cubes dribbled down their backs.
It was classic yob behaviour: exhibitionism and a total lack of consideration for other people, mixed with an incipient threat. Any request to keep the noise down, however polite, would have provoked the ugliest of scenes.
Yet these were no teenage hooligans but women in their 30s and 40s, considered to be elite members of their organisation.
Between the beer-swilling roars and guffaws, one heard snatches of talk about sales-targets and pie-charts. The sheer nastiness of many Britons nowadays is as bewildering as it is unpleasant.
You stop your car at a red trafficlight or to let people use a crossing.
The well-dressed woman in the 4X4 behind you, with a cargo of young children, mouths an enraged obscenity or gives you a V-sign.
A passing cyclist (who respects neither red lights nor crossings) whacks your door with his hand or tries to bend your wing-mirror.
Everywhere, there is a callousness, a contempt for human feelings, which was never there before. Nowadays, British visitors to New York return marvelling at the city's atmosphere of relative calm and the politeness and helpfulness of its inhabitants.
Go to almost any other European country and you feel relief at being among people who are not powder kegs of hostility and vengefulness.
The most obvious cause of all this is the tide of alcohol swilling through the country, deepened by the Blair government's insane sanctioning of round-the-clock pub opening.
Yes, of course, the British have always been prone to hit the bottle. Having grown up in the seaside pub trade, with an alcoholic for a father, I know that better than most.
But never in my lifetime has the country had a drink problem this obvious - the boozing crowds too big for most pubs to hold, and so have to spill out onto the pavement; the pretty young girls as well as silly-macho boys, screaming, fighting, puking, publicly urinating or passing out in the gutter.
Such dismal scenes would be drastically reduced if, following the plea of Cheshire's refreshingly honest Chief Constable, Peter Fahy last week, drinking alcohol in public were banned, as it is in many American states and, more importantly, parents were made to take responsibility for their children's drinking.
Here, there is little or no pressure to take adult responsibility, for one's children or anything else.
Indeed, there seem to be no adults any more.
Parents, even grandparents, wear the same clothes as teenagers, listen to the same music, ingest the same soap opera, celebrity-mag and pop-star fantasies, adorn themselves with the same hair-dyes, studs and tattoos.
Individually, those raucous sales reps at the Portuguese hotel may well have been decent, hardworking men and women.
But as soon as they got together in the sun, and sank a few beers, each morphed into a wannabe Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse.
Yob culture does not only come from children acting grown-up in all the unpleasant ways, but also from grown-ups refusing to stop being adolescents.
If codes of civilised conduct are no longer instilled in so many homes, and most schools now disclaim all responsibility for their pupils off the premises, what deterrents to endemic yobbishness - the everexpanding Brutish empire - are left? Answer: virtually none.
Police, though plentiful enough in their sherbet lemon flak jackets during terrorist emergencies, have virtually disappeared from our streets on a daily basis, preferring to stay inside their dwindling number of stations occupied with paperwork or fatuous PR.
Beat bobbies of the old school used to discourage much casual yobbery by their very presence, supplemented by the occasional judicious clip around the ear.
Instead, they now give out referee's red cards or Asbos that the yobs regard as badges of honour, or attempt to gain street-cred by patrolling on skateboards.
Last weekend, yet another socalled "think tank" recycled the current wisdom that more police on the streets would not help.
Everyone but ivory-tower academics and mindless cost-cutters knows this is nonsense. Near the spot where Rhys Jones was murdered, a mobile police station had been promised - but was then scaled down to yet another CCTV camera.
The terrible thing is how conditioned we have become to it all. At Lisbon airport, my 17-year-old nephew fell in love with a watch in the duty-free shop, but was talked out of buying it by the whole family.
For we knew that when he returned home, it would soon be taken off him by the muggers who haunt his school-gate.
Dreadful cases like that of the young father in Warrington, killed for having the courage to take a stand against the thugs who blighted his neighbourhood, deter most people from confronting yobbery, even in the relatively mild form of rowdy sales-reps in Portugal.
Don't mistake me: I am not writing off the British en masse. For every self-obsessed, foul-mouthed, sexually-incontinent imbecile glorified on Channel 4's Big Brother, there are thousands of young people, as kind and courteous as any of their ancestors.
In utter contrast with rampaging yobs are the fine young service people we have chosen to sacrifice in Iraq.
The X Factor TV talent show owes much of its appeal, I believe, to the better Britain it reveals - a land of ambitious, dedicated youngsters, loving, supportive parents, stillsolid homes and family values.
I have always been proud, if quietly so, to call myself British, and unable to imagine living anywhere else. But for how much longer?
This week it was announced that more Britons are leaving - or should that read fleeing? - the country than at any time since the great exodus to Australia in the 1960s.
So much has now become hateful here that, for the first time in my life, I feel like joining them.
Silly Machoboys would be a great name for a band.
I thought that when the UK pubs became smoke free the deaths would stop. What happened?
Did this moron really go from yobs killing innocent kids to a bunch of sales droids getting drunk by a pool? Wow, talk about moral equivalence.
Here’s a hint: The first is a threat to one’s life and safety. The second is annoying. If the author is so blinded by moral equivalence that he can’t tell the difference, then he is beyond hope. As is, I fear, the formerly great UK. Sigh.
Hey, England, you outlawed guns, and now only the outlaws have them.
If this writer says “Go to almost any other European country and you feel relief at being among people who are not powder kegs of hostility and vengefulness”, then they haven’t been to France recently.
I guess the British bulldog is now an ostrich.
I so agree with the point that he made about perpetual adolescents these days-we can thank the Sixties for that. Too bad some of them didn’t die before they got old.
what kind of country?
Why, a gun free country of course. When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.
I keep saying that in Nature, when a specie looses natural enemies, it over populates. Due to the political and legal climate, the criminal specie is loosing natural enemies.
Stop and think Britain, if you leave your nation falls!
The only solution is to stay and fight for your birthright.
I could give you good news from here in America, but
this is not the thread for my news.
Again Brits, if you leave, everyone in the civilized world loses.
We don't need no stinkin moral absolutes.
We don't need no stinkin moral absolutes.
You have come a long way baby.
I’m sure some of the rising violence is related to immigration from North Africa. I’ve heard that in France, African gangs target white Europeans as part of gang initiations. The same is probably true for the UK.
I would say the left is getting the culture they have worked so hard for; no moral absolutes, godless, promiscious, and self-loving.
Then they sit and wonder about the state of the world, and blame us. But when the world was more of the conservative moral order, it was a much better place.
I was trying to think of what has really improved in the last fifty years. Technology. Civil Rights. But I really couldn’t think of anything else. I mean, I can’t even listen to the music anymore.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/01/nyob01.xml
I'm still trying to get 'round this one; I know a couple of Brits who started to get drunk when they opened their first lagers at 8:00 a.m. Unless I miss my guess, alcohol is available whenever someone wants it if they plan ahead a little. So maybe the source of the problem is something else?
The author of the article seems to blame late night pubs, not the utter lack of civilized behavior stemming from the social revolution of the 1960s.
Can't be. ;)
“While discovering the fundamental heartlessness of American life”
Ok...
btt
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