UK riots: David Cameron condemns sick society as grammar school girl in court over riots

Meet the Looters. Interestingly, they're not quite who we imagined they'd be. Oh, there are many who fit the imagined profile, but then there is the privileged Exeter schoolgirl and the eleven-year-old from Essex. True, the majority have criminal records, but, of those arraigned, "they were predominantly white, and many had jobs."

On and on it goes:

A postman and his A-level student nephew were caught by police in a Ford Focus full of stolen televisions and laptops outside a looted superstore, City of Westminster magistrates’ court heard.

[...]

Samon Adesina, 23, a student, is said to have been one of the looters carrying a flatscreen television away from Surrey Quays shopping centre. He was remanded in custody for a week and will miss his final exam in electrical engineering at an unspecified university, Tower Bridge magistrates’ court heard. At Camberwell Green, an Essex University student, Banye Kenon, was accused of looting a Curry’s.

So what began with "the other" in Tottenham ended with Turkish shopkeepers, Sikhs, and Malaysians defending their homes, businesses, and houses of worship from marauding white Britons.

What becomes clear is that it is not only the excluded that define themselves by possessions and leapt at the chance to swipe a grander identity through theft: the rot in Western society goes right bang to the top.

Be forewarned that most of the looters, now that the initiative has been lost, will spend the coming days constructing justifications for their greed; they will become ardent socialists, or anarchists, utterly opposed to a state that lives within its means, or any kind of state at all. Be forewarned as well that much of the left will inch its way into supporting the looters, or at least "understanding" them. Pay them no heed- they are the flip side of a corroded coin, as moth-eaten and as monstrous as the corporate capitalism they oppose. They keep score by possessions, too. They only want to change the distribution.

In the end, the rot in our society stems from seeing ourselves only as material beings, judging one another by possessions and status alone, accepting ourselves as mere consumers and seeing everyone else likewise. It is a dead end, and it began to crumble away this week. People will fight like hell to preserve it, but we have all seen behind the facade.

We are more, and we must reach for more if we are to rise out of the mire: we must return to timeless values, to substance over surface. We must reconnect with spiritual reality. Material man, secular man, is a lost cause: he will always end up here again, scrabbling, scraping, and bullying for what isn't his, because his desires- our desires- can never, ever be satisfied.

If society as a whole doesn't leave this trap, we as individuals have the power to do so. Nothing can hold us back but ourselves.