neutralgamer02 said:
It is great to say, well I made it here against all odds...etc, but that doesn't really fix the problem in the system. Change may be "slow", but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. If people had that mindset in past generations, things would not be the way they are today.
I am all for change and improving social mobility in any given group of society, but the problem with this naval gazing search for understanding is that it does not (and cannot) address the reality in the here and now. Worse still, there is this implicit suggestion that people are behaving in a completely unacceptable way because, in effect, they can't help it. That it's not their fault. That they have been failed, and that's why they're doing it.
We CANNOT allow ourselves to dream up caveats where it is more 'understandable' for people to break the law. The law is THE LAW. These yobs -- and they are not just people from disenfranchised groups, you would know that if you were here -- they are acting out destruction on a scale that is
unprecedented, and they are doing in it a time of relative plenty compared to the generations that have passed before, where their forbears had to sail through storms of much greater hardship. There is NO deep reason for this scale of destructive anarchism, it is happening on this scale because we have failed to take control of it and we are too soft. I have never been so sure of anything in my life.
We can talk about how we fix problems for different ethnic and geographic groups later, in fact we are doing it right now and we do it all the time -- but we can't let it detract us from rejecting this behaviour outright, from condemning it in the strongest possible terms, putting a stop to it, and bringing down the full weight of the law for each crime as if it were any other day in any other time. Laws have been broken, its time to show some balls and start enforcing it.
