Because I Worry About These Things...

An interesting article about the London Riots, and my ramblings on the subject....

Because the situation has saddened me so, I've been trying to understand the rioting over in England, looking at articles here and there. It's amazed me how little of the news coverage really gives any insight as to what lies behind the riots: interviews with the ones involved just come across as, "because we wanted to, thought we could get free shit," and theories about 'why' are either not offered at all, or mostly vague allusions to the bad economy.  I just read another article on the subject, which at least gave me a few indeas I hadn't seen anywhere else, and sort of shone a light on the subject from the other side. Here's the link. http://www.care2.com/causes/londons-race-riots-unemployment-and-disrespect-to-blame.html

The article may have or may not be giving the rioting youth more of the benefit of the doubt than they deserve - it's almost impossible to say for sure. But I definitely feel like it's safe to assume that the mainstream press, when covering such events as these riots (or anything, for that matter), does tend to sensationalize things, and almost always wants to bury any socially- or politically-liberal content beneath the trivial and outrageous. The mainstream media outlets, at least here in the States, are all owned now by large multi-national corporations that pretty much always toe the straight conservative (i.e. Republican, here in the U.S.) party line, and always ALWAYS have an eye to protecting their own corporate interests. We did have one really excellent TV journalist here, Keith Olbermann, on one of our big-three network news outlets (one owned by Rupert Murdoch, I might add) who fearlessly spoke the truth on a regular basis, and for his boldly reporting that the emperor, in fact, truly was wearing no clothes, he was suspended several times, refused to cave in, and was ultimately fired.  He now has a show on a small non-profit network (whose Chairman is Al Gore), where he has free reign to cover the news as he sees fit.

I don't doubt that there is a large amount of opportunistic, self-serving looting, and mindless drubbing being done by a lot of the kids involved in these riots. But I would also be pretty damned surprised if there was a not truly some degree of genuine social and ethnic discontent behind it, at least for some of them, that the mainstream media is choosing to ignore. They certainly tried to downplay it in the 60's, to disparage or ignore the significance to the protests and civil disobedience, and report it mostly in ways aroused fear of and hatred of the participants - and it seems to me like the quality of journalism from the mainstream news outlets has only deteriorated since those days. If you doubt me, just try to watch CNN Headline News any given day and find out what's really going on in Congress, much less in Africa or Asia. All you hear is endless nattering about Casey Anthony (or whatever the flavor of the week sensationalist story is), and endless other trivial celebrity crap, with just a little light non-essential news on the side.

One unfortunate aspect that has struck me about the London riots is how much a role the social media like Facebook and Twitter now play in such things. They all make far too easy to foment the mob mentality in record time. It's like the kid's gossip game, but multiplied ten-thousand fold or more, almost instantly: thanks to Facebook and Twitter what might have originated with one person's idea of a genuine peaceful protest, can so easily, in a matter of minutes, be distorted into "hey mates, come Flashmob at (whatever) Underground station - we'll tear the place down & take all we can get," and seen by everyone and their brother and sister. Case in point, apparently the Wisconsin state fair last week was marred by an incident where black youths gathered in a flashmob and were randomly harassing and beating white spectators. The mob apparently was as large as 200 at one point: 11 people were injured, and 31 arrested. It's not the racial aspect of this that concerns me nearly as much as the incendiary nature of it: how easy it is to for some random comment or suggestion from someone (who can easily be just some complete whack job) to start a tiny bonfire via one post on Facebook and Twitter that can quickly become a full-blown out-of-control conflagration.

I don't know what the answers are. Clearly parental responsibility and involvement is one part: the WI State Fair now has a policy that all youths under 18 MUST be accompanied by an adult. And it goes without saying that parents need to be vigilant about what their kids do online as well as where they are and what they are doing. But not everyone in these riots here or the U.K was under 18. Whatever causes lay behind it all, whether joblessness, distrust of the police, racial unrest, or just garden-variety despair and dissolution, need to be investigated and addressed. Nothing happens in a vacuum, that much is for sure.

Get Real - Really.

Every once in a while you stumble on a bit of video or writing that just says, "oh hell, yeah," to you. You wish you had written it or said it. You wish you could put it on a billboard. You wish you could put it on a major cable channel on a continuous loop, so everyone would have to see it sooner or later.

This little bit of wonderfulness, about things being done in the name or guise of extreme positive thinking, which I found on YouTube today, is one of those rare gems. It is ten little minutes of so much wisdom, so much common sense, resolving or addressing so much of the crap that has gone on in the past ten or fifteen years and sadly continues to goes on, not to mention the endless mind-fuckery that we all  play endlessly in our own heads and put ourselves through. It gets to politics, the self-help movement, the economy, and a little about just life in general, in just a little over ten minutes, with nothing more fancy than simply a woman's voice, and a very talented guy with some magic markers. So much for the magic of high tech.

It speaks to an aspect of the self-help movement that has been a pet peeve of mine ever since Elaine Hay hit the scene back in the '80's and started telling all the gay men dying of AIDS they could heal their besieged immune systems if they just believed hard enough - leaving them to feel like failures and moral weaklings as they died because, of course, it didn't work. While I won't argue that a positive outlook is certainly helpful and far better than a moribund one, the HIV virus doesn't give a rat's ass how cheerful you are as it ravages your body without benefit of any medications to check its effects on your immune system. Offering solace is one thing, but mindless, baseless cheer-leading and offering hollow false hopes is something else altogether, and can all-too-easily become exploitative.

In recent years one of many ways that same kind of thinking has reared its ugly head again is in the form of James Arthur Ray, of the Killer Sweatlodge notoriety. James Ray was also featured in the film "The Secret," which is mentioned prominently in this little YouTube piece.  Mr. Ray's followers  - who paid more than ten grand for five days of sketchy food and lodging, neglect, bullying, and bastardized and/or stolen rituals - were told repeatedly in the sweatlodge if they complained of the extreme heat that they were "better than that," and they simply had to "play full on" as he called it, while he proceeded to cook them to death in a lodge that was several times larger, hotter, more crowded, and longer than any Indian sweatlodge ever is. (I know, I have Native friends who run  traditional sweatlodges.) Meanwhile, he sat by the door and enjoyed cool air and water he denied his followers as they sickened and died, and fled the scene back to his air-conditioned cabin as soon as the sweat ended and the true nature of the chaos he had wreaked became fully-apparent. What a sport.  

I could go on and on... the video touches on so many things that I can and have ranted about - but it does it so much more succinctly, and with better humor and much more reason than I can usually summon when dealing with such loaded issues. Just watch it.  It's well worth the ten minutes.