Niamh Ui Bhrian stresses the role of family breakdown in the riots:
. . .[S]ome facts are so startling, and some effects so obvious, that even the most liberal newspaper of the British press, the Guardian, is now acknowledging that lack of family structure is creating a huge problem. On Wednesday, the paper interviewed a youth worker from Tottenham who has spent 30 years working with disadvantaged communities. He said that parental authority had now been eroded to the point where the parents of rioting children would be afraid to discipline them.
[. . .]
Some commentators called the looters feral. But though they were obviously terrifying to the unfortunate people caught up in the rioting and burning, I think that description lets the people who have contributed to this mess off the hook. The truth is that society is falling apart (and it is happening here as well as in Britain) mostly because of the social engineering which is driven by the affluent chattering classes.
The most-educated and the most-privileged love to imagine themselves as radicals pushing out boundaries and tearing down social constructs (such as that daft old-fashioned notion, marriage), but their own lives usually remain as stable and secure as self-preservation and common sense has always dictated.
So, while liberal (usually affluent) policy-makers have spent decades talking down morality and ridiculing “old-fashioned” notions of family values, they make sure that their own families benefit from the security those values bring to their lives. Meanwhile, working class children increasingly grow up without a Dad or a sense of responsibility, and the rates of teenage pregnancy, poverty, school dropout and crime continue to spiral.
No comments:
Post a Comment