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[H]ere's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.
It's obvious these people, whether they're versed in the politics of activism or not, whether it's orchestrated or not, or whether they're even really all that conscious as to why exactly they feel an urge to cause such destruction and mayhem, are driven by some fundamental quest for acknowledgement and empowerment; obviously states of being they've exceptionally rarely had the pleasure of ever experiencing before. I don't think it's helped dismissing the whole thing as "mindless criminality", nor does it help to marginalise further by verbal dehumanisation a section of society who already feel very much left out. I'm not sure what answers that gets us, other than insulating those who might actually be worth questioning for such a sorry state of affairs because apparently there's no more to discuss beyond this being "random" and "inexplicable"? And I'm not talking about those who've been arrested. There's a cause for everything. Those rioting are human beings, like us, who share the very same range of emotions as us. If we grew up in their shoes, who's to say we wouldn't be out there with them? It's clear there's a lot of anger and disaffection there, even if it is manifesting itself in such an unsophisticated, hopelessly self-destructive and misdirected manner that is both damaging their own communities and threatening the lives of innocent others, but let's bin the myth that there's no reason behind this.