The Mean Streets of Oadby

Like just about everyone else in the UK, I watched with growing shock and lack of comprehension the violence taking place in our streets this past week. I have grown up with protest. A child in sixties’ America, I watched the Civil Rights marches and then the anti-Vietnam War protests. And yes there were riots, and businesses and homes were destroyed in growing frustration. Looting did take place. I remember when the National Guard were called in to quell a demonstration at Kent State University, when students, students protesting peacefully, were shot – dead. A cover of Newsweek magazine showed a young woman covered in the blood of her friend who had been shot, lying dead on her lap. That picture couldn’t be shown today – considered too distasteful.

Were these the ‘good ole days’ of my summer childhood? A childhood also full of playing in streets that were safe, wandering neighbourhoods and bits of scrubland in a make-believe daze, my belly full with home-grown veggies, and walking barefoot out of choice. All while the streets of Chicago burned and other children with black skin burned in churches in the Deep South.

As I watch this unrest, I can’t help thinking all of us are culpable. There can be no excuse for burning decent people out, the neighbours of those disaffected, burning them out of their homes and livelihoods. But when we turn anyone into an ‘other’, when we say ‘we’ are different, ‘they’ are animals, when we dehumanise people, when we separate ‘them’ from ‘us’, we take away any responsibility any of us have towards one another. Is it possible ‘they’ have already felt themselves isolated from ‘us’, so isolated they feel glee at taking away what little ‘we’ have. ‘We’ are made like ‘them’ – disaffected, a product of our own construction.

There is so much in the media about ‘yob culture’, ‘ASBO’s’, ‘teenage pregnancies’ and ’binge-drinking’ - young people made into outcasts, set on the sideline, outside of ‘decent’ society. And yet our culture has defined status by possessions, by celebrity, rather than by goodness. We are reaping the fruit of our own sowing.

For all the 300 or so who were out looting on the streets of Leicester Tuesday night – there were thousands who weren’t, thousands who stayed at home rather than get caught up in what was a frightening scene, thousands who might have gone out any other night – didn’t. And thousands who took their brooms and swept the streets clean the next day, who offered brews, food and shelter to the police and to their neighbours.

The coming months we have much to discern – to look at the effect of our cause, and make changes that ensure ‘status’ is not based on how much wealth people have, but rather each and every person is seen as a child of God, and loved.