Your Values Is In Disarray, Prioritizing Horribly...

...unhappy with the riches 'cause you're piss-poor morally. ~ T. I.

Romance novels. Pokemon. Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. The smell of freesias. Hiragana. Kurisu-San.

Focus, Sati. Focus and breathe.

I do not do well with fire and explosions. I have far too many memories where burned-out cars and buses and homes - and eyes - feature highly. I remember the Brixton riots of 1995, and I believe I remember the Brixton and Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, although I was still toddling around in diapers at the time. Loud noises and smouldering cars have the ability to send me into a post-traumatic state. So no, to answer your texts and messages, I am not okay. I am at home in Alby now, where it's safe and mostly peaceful, but I am not okay. I am, however, safe, which is more than I can say for Curt and his sisters, or my ex boyfriend Siji, or several dozen of my friends.

I can feel it out there, all that anger and fear and hate, and I can barely breathe for it.

I am full of rage. Full of sadness, and full of rage. And that is precisely why I can't judge the people I'm angry at too harshly - because I know where they come from. I know what it's like to scream and scream and know that nobody hears you. I too have felt that free-floating anger, that ire without a focus, that lividity that bubbles through my veins and obstructs my vision so that I cannot see where to aim it. I see so many people causing others pain, and I want to hurt them back. I want to grab all the looters and smash their heads in. I want to do the same to Cameron and Clegg and all the politicians who live in luxury while their people struggle to feed themselves. I'd gladly smash in Dumbya's face, too, for starting a war that led to a global recession. And all the faces of the fundies-who-call-themselves-Muslims who attacked on 9/11, and precipitated the war. And all the people who taught them that hurting people is ok - their teachers, their leaders...and the westerners who bombed their people way back when, to make them want to take their vengeance on America.

In fact, bring me everyone who thinks that hurting people is okay, and I'll have to restrain myself from ripping their fucking heads off.

Oh, I'm sorry - irony, you say?

This is the problem with cause-and-effect, of course. You can never trace a thing back far enough.

Rebel without a cause. Rebels with plenty of cause and without a focus. They come to mean much the same, in the end.

I see so many people wanting to judge. To place blame. I see very few willing to accept it. They did this. Nothing to do with me. It's the fault of all those pampered kids who sponge off the government. I have a job, I don't sponge or steal. It's the fault of the government for not providing enough help for the poor communities. Not my fault - I didn't vote for Cameron or Clegg, I didn't vote at all. The blame goes to the parents who raised their kids with the same lack of values that they were raised with, to the poor role models portrayed in the media, to the ministers who cut funding to schools, to everyone else. I didn't do this, THEY did this. We all have such set ideas of who to point the finger at.

We all did this. We, as a society, have a lot to answer for.

What do people need? They need food and water and shelter, obviously. And they need love and affection, and they need to be heard, and they need to feel like they have choices. Lack of choices are what cause depression. Eating disorders. Suicide. That frantic need to take control of your life, at any cost.

I do wonder how many of the fingers that are pointing are attached to people who have spent significant amounts of time in Tottenham or Brixton or Peckham. Choice - or more accurately, the feeling of having choice - is rare and valuable there. Whether the kids who are raised in those areas ACTUALLY have choices available to them or not is almost irrelevant - they FEEL like they don't. Oh, there are always success stories, about kids who were smart and motivated and found a way out of the ghetto that didn't involve a life of crime, and those stories are wonderful. But the flip side of them is that people who weren't raised in that kind of poverty think that those cases are the norm, that everyone should be able to make a success of themselves if they just tried a little harder. We forget that behaviour is learned. Nobody - or few people - are born bad. People are not born miserable. We get that way because of how we are raised, and then we raise our kids the same, unless we're lucky enough to have an external influence that teaches us another way to live. You cannot break a cycle from inside without help.

I am not justifying. There are no justifications for what we've seen over the last three days. But there are reasons. There are always reasons. We, as a community, as a country, need to be able to look back and try to find out the why's and how's of this situation. And the why is not simply that a bunch of bad kids spontaneously decided to take what they wanted and harm people for fun. Happy people do not harm others.

I'm so mad at the rioters for shooting themselves in the feet. Again. And yet, I understand. I understand a mentality that says, even if unconsciously, maybe if I shoot myself in the foot then someone will notice and give me the treatment I need for this gangrenous arm.

I don't have the answers. Not any of them. I don't know if we can trace anything back to an original cause or if the pain that our children feel goes back right to the beginning of time. I don't know how to fix a society that's broken. But I know a place we can start. So I'd like you all to do a favour for me, if you can. Tonight when you go to bed, and you get to feeling righteous about the way you've conducted yourself this week, give yourselves a pat on the back for being a good person. Congratulate yourself for resisting temptation. You could have chosen to be part of the violence, could have chosen to sacrifice others to take what you want, and you didn't. That's significant. That's wonderful. And then, after you've congratulated yourselves for making the right choice - think for just a minute or two about how lucky you are to realise, to have the knowledge, that that choice is yours to make. And be thankful.