Well Darlings,
These days one only has to pick up a newspaper, or even catch sight of a television news bulletin, to have one's stomach churning. Three young lads, teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them - two 15-year-olds still at school and a 16-year-old - all shot dead within the same fortnight. James Andre Smartt-Ford, just sixteen, was shot and killed on February 3rd at a busy ice rink in Streatham. Then on February 6th, at his home, it was the turn of Michael Dosunmu in what is thought to be a case of mistaken identity after a lethal stabbing of a 21-year-old in a nearby street (yes, another death too!), and that was followed last Wednesday - Valentine's Day, of all days! - by the shooting of Billy Cox. That also happened at the victim's home.
Many people will be deeply hurting today. Each lad will have had a family, friends, and probably tenderly loved ones too, all of them now deprived forever of his life and his love. Three young lives taken, and impossible now for anyone else to ever come to know and to love. These boys, for they were little more than that, were the victims of a growing juvenile gang and gun culture; one that feeds off a currency of drugs and alcohol. But much more than that, they were all victims of a society we allowed to happen, or even worse - one we created!
It is a society where the young live in a different world to most of us, and where a misconstrued look, a word out of place, or as thought to be in Billy's case: a simple text argument over a mobile phone, can result in the severest of consequences. We've come a long way since the Marquis of Queensbury's rules and the blooded nose or the black eye. For some teenagers today it is more like the Wild West out there; a place where all too often it is a case of kill or be killed.
The three tragic deaths which have hit the national headlines so forcibly all occurred in London: Streatham, Peckham, and Clapham. But make no mistake about it, these tragedies are not of a culture limited only to London. It exists elsewhere too. There are many towns and cities throughout the country where a similar lifestyle may be found. It is only the three deaths happening by gunfire within such a short space of time, and the youthfulness of the victims, that has made this episode so notable. That really is its only claim to being unique.
Only recently, and local to where I write this, we had a case of youngster stabbed to death by the boyfriend of a girl who complained the lad had bad-mouthed her. Violence has become a way of life for many people lately, and not just for the young, but perhaps mostly. Those caught up in this culture put no value on another's life, and seemingly little on their own.
Over the years there have been numerous studies carried out on the youth of the day, with each one of them being ever more alarming, so we need to accept: all that we are experiencing now, we have seen coming. We were forewarned, so nobody should be surprised. Today we are suffering at the hands of the offspring of the first generation to grow up knowing no real discipline or to have learned anything about respect, values, or modes of accepted behaviour - and that offspring is even more clueless.
The police and authorities love to reassure us that not all juveniles are bad; it is only a small minority, so we should not be living in fear. And that, if taken overall, is perfectly true. The majority of youngsters, when taken as an average of the whole, are no more than mischievous at the most - kids being kids, as they always have been. There still are many families holding on to traditional values and disciplines (despite the law) and correctly raising their children, especially in rural areas where life can often be better, but that is little comfort to anyone living in an area, becoming so common now, where there is an element of young people, some not yet teenagers, who roam the streets in gangs, congregate to take, sell and buy, drugs and get drunk on cheap alcohol in an attempt to escape the reality of their pathetic lives, with the majority of them being armed with at least a knife, and with guns becoming more and more commonplace. Feral kids, I heard them called recently - it's an apt description.
It was several years ago on here that I discussed the then recent research which revealed the staggering number of children, some even of primary school age, who knew how to easily obtain a gun. The alarm bells were deafening, but what of any use was done? There were initiatives (that word again!), and pictures of people like politicians and policemen with sickly grins rearing out at us from the newspapers as we were told what a good job they were doing. An "armistice" (one of many) where people could hand firearms in without fear of reprisal was set up, and we banned the sport of shooting - much to the annoyance of our Olympic team who needed to practise. But has anything improved? Of course not!
The guns handed in came from decent people, not from criminals or the young gangs, and whilst the number was substantial we need to remember these weapons were those that were in most cases safely and securely hidden away as keepsakes. They were not guns that were in circulation in the true sense of the word, and they accounted for only a small percentage of the illegal gun market. The cache collected was of little consequence to the criminal or the misguided youthful element, but it sure made good publicity for some people.
It was not the right time to be suffering those sickly grins, nor for any kind of self-congratulation. And neither has it been when similar truces have been called for knives to be handed over. Collecting weapons does little to improve anything, especially when it comes to knives. Every household will have several knives, and probably many, that in the wrong hands are easily capable of killing someone. No, it's not the weapons that need collecting, it's those who carry them and would use them we should be collecting!
From the early days of treating children like adults, of reasoning with them rather than disciplining them, and of giving them even more and more freedoms, society has progressively declined. We have come so far along this path that today there are many young people out there who have never experienced discipline to the slightest degree - they are, quite simply, unable to comprehend rules, regulations, or expected modes of behaviour. Such things bewilder them and they become angry - and yet never once have the self-elected and unchallengeable experts, those who promoted this way of raising children, looked back over their shoulders to question whether the continuing decline in our society could possibly be accounted for by their methods.
Spare the rod and spoil the child has never been up for debate. To hold such a view is seen by these people as old-fashioned, worthy of ridicule, and makes one the object of their contempt. They tell us the kids have rights, and that they should never be smacked or even humiliated. These people are unable to differentiate between a corrective smack being administered and physical child abuse - the result of this being we fail our children.
Yes, the kids do have rights - they have the right to be raised in a manner proven to be able to make fine young men and women out of them - but when a corrective smack can have a parent up in court on an assault charge, they have little hope of having those rights exercised correctly. And so we have been forced to follow this path these people have laid down, this alien to nature's way, until we have now reached a point where they tell us extra armed police are to be employed on our streets in an attempt to deal with our out of control gun-toting hooligan element - many of them our children.
Today we live in fear of our children, so much so that there are those who are prepared to see them gunned down if necessary. Unless we change our ways soon, I predict that tomorrow we shall be hiding away in sheer terror of them. Already we are hearing of areas the police dare not go, and although the police strenuously deny that, the stories keep coming back to haunt us - most recently on Question Time last week. If we're not careful, and we don't rapidly do something about this, we could yet come to think of Al Capone as having been nothing more than a pussy cat!
Whilst there is seemingly nothing at the present time able to control some of the youngsters, and they may do as they please, breaking rules and committing horrendous crimes, the adult population is burdened further by yet another "enforcement" that no doubt we shall do little to rid ourselves of, but will obey whilst persistently moaning about it. "Enforcement" is the new in-word being used by our authoritarian state. I don't think you will find one council anywhere in the UK that does not now use this word. Once upon a time laws and local by-laws were passed, and we were told to observe them. Being the good citizens we were, mostly they were observed. But now with the laws being passed so numerous, and with many of them seeming quite unnecessary and some just plainly stupid beyond belief, we find that officialdom has to provide a means of enforcement.
Nearly £30 million is being given to councils so that they may recruit and train people - an army of snoopers - to spy on us in our pubs, restaurants, shops, and public places, and all in case someone should light up a cigarette and have a crafty drag in a no smoking area. To give you some idea of the scale, Liverpool will start off with around 200 people spying on the public, based around a hardcore of 30(ish). We're told the snoopers do not have to identify themselves when they enter a premises, and they are perfectly entitled to secretly film or photograph people in order to gather their evidence. They are empowered to issue offenders with £50 on the spot fines, and their evidence will allow the council to take court action against the owner of the premises where the offence took place. Hmm . . . By another name isn't this persecution? Harassment? How much does it differ from being subjected to gangland rule? And what message does it send out to the young? Gangs rule - okay?
Ten years ago anyone predicting such a situation could exist in this country, a country that fought two world wars for people's freedoms and quality of life, would have been laughed at and considered an imbecile. Today this is Blair's Britain, and we are suffering it. No longer are we seen as a nation of shopkeepers; today we are nation of spied on and downtrodden sufferers of an authoritarian Nanny State. A state that taxes us more than at any other time on record, and yet is one that doesn't educate us correctly, doesn't provide the health care we desperately need, and doesn't help the aged, the poor, or the young sufficiently, so that now in all these things we lag behind countries that once appeared primitive to us.
How many lives could that close on £30 million allocated to recruit more gangs of people to spy on the most spied on nation in the world have saved were it to have been spent on medicines and some of the new wonder drugs, or on keeping a ward or two open in some of the failing hospitals, or on a decent sexual education for the young, or on improving a few of our dangerous roads, or on countless other equally important things that are so desperately in need of money? We shall never know the answer to that question, but we do know that where it is being spent it will not save even one person's life, but it will be a misery to millions of people's lives.
What price a person's life? What a message! And what a Hell this country has turned into!
See you next week . . .
"The Bitch!" 17/02/07.
Update as this goes online: More shootings in London involving youths, and some in Manchester.
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About the Author
"The Bitch!", a weekly UK News Review column, is hosted by the author and columnist Michael Knell. These articles appear on the Blackpool Gay Directory website, but are not specifically gay in content. More information on the author: http://www.michaelknell.com and on the directory: http://www.astabgay.com.
