A Grumpy Old Man is Confused.
 

Why are so many youths now taking the step from fighting one another over the local park to killing one another with knives. I don't buy the whole poverty argument, nor do I sympathise with the whole 'alienation' one. But something is going on that seems very different to what's taken place in recent times. I can honestly say that, growing up in what is now a particular problem area regarding youth-related knife crime, that I honestly never knew of a single incident in which a kid was stabbed by another kid.

I was in a cab today where the driver told me that his teenaged son had just been stabbed outside of his school. This took place in the relatively suburban, quiet area of Raynes Park. The cab driver was roughly my age and so the conversation inevitably descended into the usual 'not in my day' pattern. And yet I consider myself quite a rational and sceptical soul, not given over easily to flights of nostalgia. And yet, in this instance, I feel that something has changed within the mindset of large sections of today's youth. I just don't know why or how.

It's easy and counterproductive to blow all of this out of proportion, but equally it's convenient, naive, and in the end dangerous to brush it aside and pretend that something isn't taking place.

it is not just the youth, EVERYONE today, especially people who do not, or chose not to, use critical thinking, have been taught for decades that all that matter is the self, self-esteem, money, and one's opwn personal value.

life, in general, is not a thing to be admired, to be resopected and to be in awe of. life is just a state of being to these losers, and to kill or stab someopne over the merest trifling thing, is commonplace again, like it was when life was truly cheap, quick and rough.

how is this progress huh?

kids are stupid.

end of.

I know people who have been stabbed and even someone who stabbed someone. A kid I went to school with, well his brother was stabbed and killed on a city bus a few years back.

Sometimes I'm sure I'd feel safer if I walked around with a knife, but honestly the more people there are who walk around with knives the more likely someone is to get stabbed.

Kids were stupid when I was growing up too. I was stupid. Definitely. But there's a difference between being stupid and stabbing someone out of some kind of 'disrespect' issue.

kids are stupider.

end of.

kids are angrier, more ignorant and more violent.

beating someone to a pulp is not enough to demonstrate power? i don't know, i find that completely retarded.

Ignorance is almost celebrated these days... which probably has something to do with it.

I can't say I understand exactly what it is, but this whole thing about 'respect' and 'honour' seems to be a big part of the problem. Ironically, the people that crave 'respect' the most are invariably those least able to extend it to others.

In all honesty, it seems to me that it's based in poor upbringings--which could be poverty, but it could also be bad parenting or a bad family life. If it starts in one family, it's very easy for the child to continue, and worsen, the cycle to the point of violence.

In poor areas, that cycle is prominent because there's a lot of anger at seemingly helpless situations. I've also heard testimony from L.A. gang bangers that there's really not much else to do in their part of town. It's join a gang, or do nothing all day.

Although LA clearly isn't the UK, much of what goes on here does seem to be an attempt to emulate an attitude that stems from US gang culture. Although on a much grander scale, the whole drive-by phenomenon (which thankfully has never really taken hold in the UK) still seems to be an underlying influence.

I'm not ruling poverty or boredom out as a factor. I just think that there's something more going on here. Again, lack of money and things to do were a fact of life when I was growing up, but its effects on behaviour seem far different to what they are today.

A couple of people got stabbed when i was in school. In 2002 a girl got stabbed with a fork in the play ground. Sounds funny, or at least it did at the time "dude, she got stabbed in the arm with a fork". Now seems kinda scary. In 2003 a boy got stabbed with a knife in the leg in the playground.

Thinking about it, my school was pretty dangerous, quite a few people carried knives, and made it know.

A boy got his jaw broken in a fight in the play ground.
Another boy smashed his arm through a window and his whole wrist was totally slashed, the skin was basically hanging from his arm. But the kids i went to school with had unity with each other, everyone knew the kids that had knives or weed or worse, but no one told.

There were some really bad science room experiments gone very bad too whilst i was there.

This perfectly sums up my school days.

Oh and Daniel Kitson is a genius, BTW.

Right, but I think it builds over generations. In America, at least, your generation was still more dangerous than the previous one.

It's kind of like censorship on TV. It starts out with little blips here and there, letting a shoulder slip, then a few mild swear word, and eventually no one cares about anything anymore. Not that that's a bad thing, but it seemed like a decent metaphor. If a bored and angry kid grows up to be a bored and angry father, there's a good chance he'll raise an even angrier kid.

not just poor upbringing, but detached and ignorant upbringing might be another factor.

kids are being raised by the tv, not by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles like the used to be.

nuclear families where nobody is home & ask the little shit "where have you been all day?" etc.

when i was a kid, not only was i surrounded by numberless relatives thoughout the day, but also my parents knew who i hanged out with & what not-- i mean we ran wild on the street, without real "supervision", but we always got debriefed at dinner time.

if i had said "oh my friend X is packing knives", the shit would have hit the fan.

I agree that there seems to be an accumulation of cuntishness as time moves on. But then we can look at the Victorian era where things were clearly far worse than they are now. The seventies, when I was growing up, is another interesting period. That was an extremely violent decade, but in a very different way to the way in which violence seems to exist today. I remember football hooligans, skinheads, people getting mugged by rastas. But school children simply weren't a group that were feared then the way they are now.

Like that episode of the simpsons where the kids are asked to give homer a hug after he is accused of sexual assault on TV. Lisa says "Sorry dad, it's just so hard not to listen to TV, it's spent so much more time raising us than you have"

Most of these stabbings, I'm assuming, are involved with male heterosexuals. And in the teen male culture, the only emotion other than...happiness, that is really allowed or accepted among peers is anger. Everything becomes anger. I've seen it first hand. If it isn't good, it's anger. And the lack of good parenting, the high divorce rates, even the sensationalized violence and even just adventure/danger in the 21st century has got to contribute to that.

The kids are brainwashed, stupid, angry, and they living dangerously helps them get over it. But inevitably someone gets hurt.

Perhaps it means that it's just a cycle, and that there's hope. We're just getting adjusted to the era's changes and it happens to be affecting that demographic most.

Baby riots in 2050, eh?

Yes, definitely. The people I feared most when growing up were my family. I got up to all kinds of silliness as a kid but the thought of getting in trouble with my parents was a major restraining factor. Parents, especially younger ones, seem totally ill-equipped to raise children.

I'm going to offer an economic idea: in London, there is a very heavy emphasis on money. It's shit-difficult to get a job and a mortgage and live in a nice enough area. The reason nearly everyone on the tube during rush hour is a cunt is because you have thousands of people rushing towards a place where they feel demeaned and under-paid. The high-paid cunts in suits who will mow a geriatric down just for not walking quickly enough (or, sin of all sins, standing on the left on the escalators) have very little regard for anyone. This attitude comes to perpetuate itself in the 'lower' ranks of society.

It's not all doom and gloom, there are a lot of amazing, wonderful people in London. I used to live in Clapton, and the Homerton train where I would get to the rest of the world from was where someone was stabbed a couple of years ago. I met some wonderful people in that area, some amazing teenage freestylers, some of the friendliest African people you could imagine, a crack-head who would give you the shirt off his back (etc etc).

My point is that because the 'higher' ranks in society are often utter turds (which I suspect is a non-causal consequence of house prices (etc)), the young 'uns pick up on that general social nihilism, and manifest it in a different way, with knives.

Video games.

Hip Hop.

Undercooked burritos.

My post is easier to read than Glice's so mine's better.

I'd buy that if it was a problem isolated to London, but it takes place all over Britain. I really think it's a cultural thing, albeit one that finds it's most acute expression within more economically deprived areas (be it in parts of London, Manchester, Nottingham and, I'm sure, Bristol). It seems to be a shift in mindset, in which ideas of self-worth are shown almost solely by disregarding the worth of others. In its most extreme form this can be the act of stabbing someone simply because ..., at its more benign level it is playing music at levels that would inevitably antagonise one's neighbours.

Maybe we should stop thinking of kids as 'special', and start letting them know that, in the big scheme of things, actually, they aren't that special at all. I dunno, it's an argument that just goes around in circles. But definitely, until the 'Left' feel willing to look beyond mere economic causes, while the 'Right' come around to acknowledging tougher sentencing isn't the sole solution, we'll be stuck in the middle, having to cope with a problem that doesn't fit particularly comfortably with any political agenda.

New York is safer now than when I was growing up.

It's not exactly like you see kids stabbing each other in London all the time either.

No, you don't, and I'm very aware that a lot of the media has become quite hysterical about the issue, but equally I can't say that it isn't becoming a problem in turns of an increase in incidents.

I don't know, there isn't much anyone can do about this unless they either open many cans with many worms in them or go for the zero tolerance approach that ultimately can result in more sporadic violent and appalling crime.

I mean, it's alright to chat about it but ultimately the root of what happens is largely ignored in favour of what you see on the surface. You can't really resolve an issue like this, you just reduce its effects on society as much as you can.

God, you sound like an old nostalgic fool. You're obviously going through something. Sometimes these things are hormonal--have you seen a doctor?

YOU DON'T!

thank gawd they are only using knives!

i think pretty much all the problems in this country are due, to some extent or another, the appaling state of education here.

with their dicks.

nothing has changed in the mindset of today's youth. what has happened is that a neighborhood has changed, or is in the process of changing. perhaps if the youth would kindly contain the violence to the designated ghetto areas, then a grumpy old man wouldn't be confused.

See, this sort of sentiment makes me quite angry. Not a personal thing, I have no major reservations against your good self Mr & B. But. I went to a shitty comp. There was a couple of (non-fatal) stabbings, plenty of teen pregnancies, lots of under-achievers, lots of people for whom English wasn't their first language given inadequate language support (and thus failing in spite of their superior intellect), lots of people wasting their lives on weed, pills and 'higher' drugs and then people like myself who, arrogantly enough, should've done better but no-one cared about the 'gifted' kids. It hasn't affected me massively - I was going to be a cunt whatever - but I was a lot more 'socially disadvantaged' than a lot of the now smack-heads, and while I was failed by the comp system, I was failed because I was clever, and I'm still a smart-arse cunt, regardless of the education system I was in.

I don't really have a very big point except it's very easy to point the finger at education, which always strikes me as erroneous. By way of a counterpoint to the above, I ended up in quite a good college with some 'best education money can buy' sorts, at least 12 of which are now on smack and living on the streets, after their families finally cut their financial-umbilical cords sometime in their early-mid-20s.

Not enough in the south-west to constitute 'exceptional', I'm afraid. Although suicide rates continue to rise in Devon/ Cornwall, drug deaths in Somerset and both rising in south Wales. Unfortunately, unless a statistic is outside of an area's 'average', it doesn't get much press. Oh, and unless I'm much mistaken, Somerset has the highest levels of underage drinking in the whole of Europe. There is something exceptional about the gun/ knife crime increase in London/ Manchester/ other, but these are areas notorious for the same - the worrying thing, in press terms, isn't that it's happening, it's that it's happening amoungst the under-16/18s.

Ignorance is fucking ENFORCED, the arrogance of the stupidos on this board is evidence, but they don't seem to be around so much lately, maybe that psyop is over now?

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062908.html

Not that I've noticed.

i thought this was going to be another thread about gmku.