anger and the gasoline

I'm sitting at SFO, getting ready to fly to Chicago, sit for three hours, then fly to Madison for the Federation (Institute's) Summer Meeting. I've been so busy concentrating on getting the logistics for the meeting lined up and dealing with last minute, over the transom requests from attendees and presenters, that the riots in Tottenham had sort of passed me by. I mean I'd heard something was going on, but had no idea of the extent of the rioting. The pictures over at the Boston Globe are amazing.

I first wrote shocking, but that suggests that a certain horror at the destruction. I've never seen a riot do such damage to property. But I guess I'm not shocked at the fact that it happened. A man is shot in a poor neighborhood and it's a reason and a pretext at once. Reason because of the anger and anti-police feeling nearly endemic to poor neighborhoods, driven by how police operate in these places. (I'm guessing that the situation in Britain is pretty much like it is here in the US and the way it was outside Paris a couple of years ago.) And pretext, because of the looting and destruction of small businesses.

There was the same dynamic in Oakland after the Oscar Grant verdict, though the Oakland police tightly controlled and monitored the situation. After it was over, they reported that most of the people, mainly young, that were arrested were not from Oakland and had come in specifically for the protest/riot.

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. There is a lot of anger, justified and not. There's a lot of hopeless too. I wonder whether someone who's in their twenties now feel like it's the morning of the world. Right now, I doubt it.

Rioting has spread to three other cities as of this morning (August 9th). The commentator on MSNBC is making a link to the 1980's race riots in London, but from the pictures, this is a pretty multi-racial event.

Sitting in Madison, WI now (the day after the Dems almost took back the legislature), I've had a chance to do some more web-research on the London riots. There is one story and this time I mean shocking. The BBC had Darcus Howe on for his take on the riots and the interviewer kept trying to play gotcha with him, disregarding and disrespecting his opinion and experience. (BBC later apologized.) There's a good story in the Guardian on the make up of the crowd. Finally there's a good piece in the English version of Al-Jazeera on the essentially political nature of these riots.

Some other articles point out the failing economy in Britain, the lack of jobs for youth, and the fact that the major political parties there are closer together than they've ever been. There's not any way for the poor, the variously disenfranchised to have a political voice. And I have little doubt that's not a factor in the burning cities.