As you may or may not know, I am not one to harp on about my own life, but with the recent violence in London, I feel the need to do a bit of a heart on my sleeve type post. Whenever I suffer from writers block I tend to spend great deals of time in front of a keyboard typing 'we are at war with ourselves', and deleting it again. This time I am not deleting it. We are at war with ourselves.
I woke up and went to go to work a few days ago, upon leaving my flat and reaching the high street, I first saw the shattered glass, it was exactly like Krystallnacht under the Nazi regime in the 30s... except much, much worse. Upon entering the shopping centre I work at, I came to the front of the shop I worked at and this was the sight I came across...
It looks nice doesn't it? Well by the end of the day it looked like this...
Destroyed by looters, apparently in response to the killing of a man with a gun in Tottenham, but this wasn't Tottenham and this was beyond a protest. It was like the Arab Spring. At times like this I wonder why Britain can't take its crowd control tactics from oppressive middle east regimes that up until last week I was condemning. You might say that this says two things about me, the first is that I am quite liberal and possibly left leaning, the second is that I am completely reactionary...
The strangest thing is that the above picture might be from anywhere in the Arab world but it could also just as easily be Shoreditch highstreet. And it is in fact Shoreditch high street (it isn't, it's Syria...No just kidding, its actually Shoreditch... I could do this forever.)
But it is the most bizarre thing that London looks like Sharm El Sheik looked at the start of the year, it would seem that to have a democracy isn't actually enough to stop people rioting... they need something more...
They need Air Max. They need playstation 3's, they need Ipod's. And they need them for free.
It is for this reason that it is only fair that we call them freedom fighters, because although they are not fighting for freedom, they are fighting to get stuff for free.
The government are being quite clear in saying that there is no political motive for the riots that started in Tottenham and spread throughout the UK. That these youths are simply opportunists, something even more alarming is the age of some of the people arrested... below is a picture of the youngest offender to have been arrested.
Not a hint of shame on his face.
But back to my own personal experiences of the riots, at 3pm the decision was made to shut the shopping centre I work in, with the promise of an oncoming mob...
...and Michael Jackson
The busses had stopped running, I was nowhere near a train station and Taxi's were not driving in the area. I was lucky enough to find a horse roaming the streets and so I rode it back to my home. By the time I got there I was greeted with a site that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
The looters had transformed the block of flats I lived in to the final spine chilling scene of planet of the apes, I'm not sure if they did it to coincide with the release of the new planet of the apes film, but if they did they did it a week too early. So the joke is on them.
Of course, none of this happened, but you'd have probably liked me more if it had. you'd probably all send me flowers and messages of support, and probably you'd have had me canonized. There was some trouble in the town i'm from but I was off on my middle class annual 10 day holiday in the sun in Greece. The Irony is that the week after I booked the holiday riots broke out in Greece, and then 3 days before I was due to come home riots broke out in London... I am starting to feel extremely unloved.
No comments:
Post a Comment