Humanity lost it's way

If you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the (UK) news recently, then it's highly likely that you've seen the story that's dominated the headlines these last few days: "Riots in London" is what sums it all up. The UK, a country that prides itself on it's civility and high standard of living, has descended into looting, rioting and general mayhem and destruction.

The video only shows a small amount of what was happening, yet at the same time, it sums it up a lot. It basically comes down to one thing- destruction for the sake of destruction.

It all started in the Tottenham area of London, where people were peacefully protesting over the death of a man in possession of a firearm after the police shot him, apparently without warning. I wasn't there, so I can't comment on if that's true or not, but somehow, the protest turned violent. The violence spread across London, people were giving reasons such as "[It's the] recession. We're bored and we've got no money." One person even claimed they were doing it to "get my taxes back." Idiocy doesn't even begin to cover it.

For a while, the mindlessness threatened to overrun the entire country, but people seemed to come to their senses, and it all slowly died away. Despite what you saw in the video, the police response was very minimal- it was almost as if they were scared to get involved. This lead to people talking about getting the army to diffuse the troublemakers, but there's an extremely good example against this course of action- did somebody say Northern Ireland?

Yes, there were riots in Northern Ireland, and the army were brought in to subdue the situation. The resulting standoff lasted 30 years.

So, what happens now? The violence has seemingly stopped, but I know for a fact that some retail outlets are still employing an extremely high level of caution, and with good reason- it only takes one or two people to start it up again, especially in the aftermath. The scenes are still fresh in people's minds, and if they've got the intelligence of a cheese sandwich (which, let's face it, most of the people rioting and looting do), then they'll want to imitate what they've seen on the magical picture box. And, thus, the mayhem will begin again.

There are many words that can be used to describe these people, but most of them can't be used in polite company. I'll leave it up to each individual to decide how extreme they want to take the descriptions, but I think that by my "cheese sandwich" remark it's an easy assumption that my own feelings are far from neutral on this one.