Aftermath

It has been quite a long time since I last wrote anything here. This is primarily down to laziness, but a lot has changed in this time as well, and I will continue to use this as an excuse for the laziness: My computer died, and then our other computer died (meaning that the hard-drives on both of them ceased to exist, within a few weeks of one another, which was just perfect); I moved house (and had no computer or internet for a few weeks); and I started interning at a small fashion studio in Kennington (later blog entry on this to come). Losing my computer after 5 years was quite sad. Having to sell it because I'm so poor was sadder. Only getting £30 for it was the saddest thing of all. Moving house in London was far more stressful than I first anticipated, and I cannot possibly endure it every July, without fail, anymore. I only started interning about 3 weeks ago, but having spent my days prior to this doing very little of anything, having a job has tired me sufficiently to make me not want to do much of anything when I get home. Thus, blogging has been off my mind for quite a while.

However, I can safely say the transitional stage is over now. I have settled into my new place, settled into my job (even though it may only be until the end of September with no room for a full-time position after that), and bought myself a new computer. The latter is somewhat entangled in another matter which has been going on for the past two weeks and caused me further stress (and again I am using this as an excuse for being too lazy to write anything). This matter would be the deposit from my previous apartment. I bought this computer on finance (6 months interest free, 10% paid up-front), hoping that when I get my deposit back, I will be able to pay it off fully. I have since learnt the lesson that landlords in London (or maybe I was just extremely unlucky) are greedy, extortionist arse-holes, and I am currently taking legal action against my previous gem of a landlord who is trying to pry £915 from us. Now I am just hoping that this is settled within 6 months, so that I can pay for my laptop, otherwise I will once again be considering prostitution to pay the remaining £900. I would like to take this opportunity to further express my opinion that you cannot trust anyone, because everyone is in fact, a cunt.

There have been other, more widely recognised and important occurrences than my deposit that have happened since I last wrote anything though. Amy Winehouse met an untimely death, and good music was dealt a double blow when this was followed by Cher Lloyd's single reaching number 1 in the singles chart. And the event that I feel I should spend the rest of this entry addressing; watching my city burn last week.

The riots that broke out last weekend in London, and which quickly spread across the country, were no surprise, even though I was woken in the middle of the night by my boyfriend showing me a live feed of the fires in Tottenham. At the time I couldn't have cared less. I just wanted to sleep, and wouldn't appreciate being woken from my slumber even if a bomb had just been dropped on the city. But in the light of the next day, and the front page of every newspaper showing images of Tottenham, completely destroyed, I realised that something quite serious was taking place.

Far from being surprised, I accepted that this was going to happen at some point. With the Conservatives raping the country the way they are, fucking the economy; pushing the poor, underprivileged class of society further towards breaking point through brutal and archaic austerity measures, it was only a matter of time (as one youth in Tottenham said himself 2 weeks before the riots actually did break out). Over the next 2 days, I watched as numerous locations of my city were attacked, looted, and burnt to the ground. On Monday I saw all the shops on my street shut up early, and their owners stand around the street looking as though they expected trouble. One or two broken windows and a boarded up Tesco is the only thing I experienced first hand, but elsewhere there were far more serious events and consequences.

Perhaps the most surprising factor that I noticed during these riots, were not the riots themselves, but the responses from almost everyone I know: That these riots are completely meaningless, opportunist violence, from underclass scum who want nothing but to wreak havoc. It wasn't the fires, it wasn't the charred and blackened streets that shocked me the most. It was this over-generalised and frankly ignorant outlook of events. The fact that people refused, point blank, to accept the idea that maybe, just maybe, there could be a larger picture, that maybe there was a reason behind the anger.

The shooting of Mark Duggan aside, it couldn't be perhaps because of the means by which these people have to survive? It couldn't be because they are oppressed and ghettoised by the government, into areas with the highest unemployment rates in the country? Because they have no money for education (now that the EMA has been scrapped and university fees have tripled)? Because their benefits; their only means of survival in a world of no education and no job prospects, have been slashed (and I know first hand just what it is like to live on £20 a week)? Because three quarters of their youth centres were just closed? Because they are completely ostracised by a government formed entirely of people who were born into privilege, and have never had to worry about finding a job, or paying for their education, or just paying the bills? It couldn't possibly be because their lives were pretty shit to begin with, and are even worse now that the Conservatives are in power? No. It must all be down to the way their parents raised them.

Now I am not condoning the riots (cliche of the week), or saying that the above reasons are a good enough motive to destroy local shops and burn down people's homes. All I am saying is, that perhaps there is a larger picture, and to deny that there are a multitude of reasons and catalysts for rioting, is extremely naive. Either that or just plain ignorant. It is exactly what David Cameron wants: for society to agree with him, to deny any reasons behind the riots, to denounce then as pure criminality without any motive other than just violent impulses and bad parenting. Of course he couldn't possibly have his own agenda.

I guess it's easy for people in comfortable £20,000+ jobs to do so. And it's easy to jump on the bandwagon of Facebook pages that popped up such as "Not rioting, because you have a job to go to in the morning". And it's easy to ignore the real reasons, because "pure criminality" is a much simpler one. And it's what Theresa May, that pinnacle of good values said, after all. Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to have such luxuries as an education and a well paid job.

I don't possibly see how we will ever reach an age where riots are a thing of the past, until we accept and analyse the reasons behind them. But as the vast majority of people proved last week, we are very far from that point. It wasn't the anger at the rioters that I fundamentally opposed; obviously, when people start trashing your city; your home, you get pissed off. That's totally understandable. What really bothered me was that it seemed like an extremely small minority of people who actually accepted that there must be some causality between the riots, and the events which preceded them. What really bothered me was that people could be so utterly detached, and ignorant of the class that these people come from; of the way that they are forced to live; of the frustration and anger that they must feel from just trying to get by. This was what really upset me, and frankly, I was more disgusted at some of the labels that the rioters were given than at their actions.

I believe that the last week has been a very sad one. Not only because we saw our society collapsing in on itself, but because the vast majority of people agreed with David Cameron, the man whose actions and decisions led to rioting in the first place. It's never good when your country erupts in mass social unrest, but when the country seems to unanimously agree with a Tory, it is an extremely sad day indeed.