Bill Hobbs passes along a quote from a relative in London. Of course, Britain has a future, it simply may not be very pretty. In some sense, we may be looking at it right now.
"There is no way to pretend anymore that Britain is a society with a future." - my cousin, who lives in London.
What's wrong with these two paragraphs from a New York Times article? Notice anything interesting?
For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government’s spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country’s poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.
David Lammy, Britain’s intellectual-property minister, also called for a suspension of Blackberry’s encrypted instant message service. Many rioters, exploiting that service, had been able to organize mobs and outmaneuver the police, who were ill-equipped to monitor it.
Ahh, these poor, poor people. What a shame they can't eat their Blackberries.
Actually, social program cuts, or not, the most frightening aspect of the rioting in London, which began to spread throughout England last night, is that there hasn't been a clear and genuine central theme, cause, or call for something behind it. It is, in a word, anarchy.
There are some interesting observations to be made from the various offerings below via Merrian Webster - an Encyclopedia Britannica company. Encyclopedia Britannica is Latin for British Encyclopedia. How ironic that absence of government would be item a when, as everyone knows, there is more than enough government in Britain. Evidently it never occurred to dear old Merriam that one could have all the government in the world and still have anarchy. How could it? England, as with most of Europe, has always seen government as a panacea. It was the thing that would fix and manage all things. All they had to do was do away with those crusty old monarchies, except as something of a tourist attraction, replace it with a bunch of Lords, Ministers, and so on, and all would be well. But it didn't quite happen that way, did it?
a: absence of government
b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
Cue America, which embarked on a different sort of experiment some 235 years ago. In large part, the American experiment was based upon the premise that, rather than the government, it was the individual that sat at the top of the hierarchy. Government was a necessary inconvenience not to be expanded upon at every turn - into every minute aspect of the individual's life. Said individual was supposed to be self-governing, if you will.
Now, that doesn't exactly sound like the America we have today - does it? So, what happened? It's easier to understand if one thinks of government as sort of an organism primarily interested in its own growth, health and well being. In terms of American society, events occured - major events. So major that it was impossible for the individual to address them, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. And what did government do?
Well, for better, or worse, and I'd say better, it rose up and addressed them. Unfortunately, it didn't stop there, standing down to allow the people to simply go about their business. Each significant event in American history - and there have been many - has provided government the rationale to grow and expand, ignorant or uncaring of the degree to which it was supplanting the individual.
As an aside, just as Roosevelt did it during the Great Depression, Barack Obama came into the White House fully aware of how the financial meltdown at the end of the Bush presidency provided him a vehicle to aggressively do the very same thing, now.
Call it centralized government, socialism, big government, or whatever you wish, Britain, as with most of Europe, has always been ahead of the curve relative to America on that front because we actually started out going the other way. Today that's changed.
What Britain is finding out is that big government and big government solutions ultimately don't work because they destroy the individual - or at least many of those things that allow them to remain a civil person capable of living in a civil society. Rather than taking responsibility for that themselves, it becomes just one more thing the government should do for them.
Unfortunately, it can't. If it could, one semester of civics classes should solve all of Britain's current problem. What are the odds of that happening, let alone working? The result is precisely what we are observing in Britain today. Throngs of people, the better aspects of their individuality now crushed by the government through various mechanisms meant, with best intentions, to do for them, has all but done them in, turning them into fodder for the latest flash mob.
And it's already beginning to happen in America - as is the case in Philadelphia, now - a bit of historic irony, if you will - cue the Liberty Bell. Yes, the great American Experiment has now been so co-opted by the governmentalists it's increasing difficult to recognize our own beginnings, including in our classrooms today.
Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic, as not even our editorialists see all this as a problem with the individual. No, it's just another big problem for bigger government to solve. I disagree with Hobbs' cousin, London has a future. We're likely to be seeing the beginnings of it, now. And given that the American experiment has been hijacked by the same mindset that holds sway in Britain and Europe, we're likely just beginning to realize our own future, as well.
My God, there are riots in the streets, what do we do? Well, grow government, pay them off, open a new sports field, or recreation facility, of course, silly, that'll fix everything, won't it? Unfortunately, no. Nothing will fix America until we again come to realize and appreciate the roll of the individual. But there's nothing in that for the government, so don't look for it to be tried anytime soon.
It's easy to dismiss a connection between the Philadelphia mobs and London's riots; Philadelphia's mobs don't have a "cause" and have not been prompted by an external event.
But we're misguided if we don't understand that our own unstable economy, with high jobless figures especially in poorer neighborhoods, and deep budget cuts to education and social services could be a less dramatic but just as incendiary set of circumstances that the young may be responding to. They might not be protesting any one thing, but lashing out at everything, and although it's valid for the mayor to tell parents to take more responsibility, let's not forget that many of the homes that these youth must get to earlier could be miserable; parents spread their misery to their kids.
As do big governments, unfortunately. And as long as that lesson remains lost on America and American government, we will only continue to grow government, so to spread said misery wider and more effectively as we go.
