A Continuous End of Days

So, the world is ending or something.

The tin-foil hat squad are storing bottled water and salted beef in an uncompleted underground bunker they've been digging since the 1980s. The US is apparently dead, even though it isn't, and the revolution has apparently been fought on the streets of London with hoodies and bad dialogue. A revolution based on free sneakers and X-boxes, the revolution will not have fallen arches; the revolution will pwn noobs.

This same but different set of news events has sent many opinion writers scampering to their screens to explain the crisis and to lament our inevitable doom. That's fine, it's actually rather engrossing if you get into the spirit of it, but does it achieve anything? Well…, no, not unless making people scared and/or depressed can be counted as a result. Hand wringing is great, I've wrung a few hands in my time, but it's ultimately self-indulgent and pointless. Nothing is more ineffective against a riot than writing 'moral decay' on an imaginary piece of paper. You cannot house people by saying 'moral decay', neither educate nor employ them. You cannot write policy with the words moral decay. You can however, fill column after column in papers around the world and on the internet with end is nigh hyperbole and get a lollipop from your editor.

This is all fine as long as it's only journalists participating; when politicians get involved in the collective navel-grazing about a perceived cultural decline, strap on your concrete worry boots. When this happens you see the introduction of ground breaking social policy, such as convicted rioters being evicted from social housing, because there's nothing that benefits disaffected youth like homelessness to go with unemployment and their parents' smack addiction. "Where are your sneakers now you chavvy fuckwit?"

You get British Prime Minister David Cameron pining for the lack of grounded father figures. That's right, all the rioters were clearly fatherless, quite obvious in fact. Solution? Here’s your government appointed dad (business hours only), complete with pipe, slippers and an after-hours hug machine. That will quench the local youth's near limitless thirst for sneakers and smashing in a bus shelter.

All this of course rests on the notion that the riots were conducted completely by some shadowy underclass, disconnected from mainstream Britain, and ignores the fact that many of the convicted looters have middle class backgrounds. It also ignores what started the riots, which was that the police shot someone that they maybe shouldn't have and that the media did the rest giving the riots 24hr coverage. By convincing everyone that the world has gone mental led people to the obvious conclusion: "Let's go mental."

It's pretty obvious that there are numerous causes, and that different actors had different agendas. To boil the riots down to no dads and moral decay is bullshit, and it serves no one but the people spouting it. The fact is that there's probably no solution, or if there is, it would be completely unacceptable to the current structure of western society. This is a by-product of our lifestyle, we might just have to live with it, or move into a nice bunker.