Violence Is Intoxicating

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night.

People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
~ from Panic on the Streets of London by Laurie Penny ~

In a post earlier this afternoon, I asked if Americans would ever take to the streets to protest what is going on in this nation and across the globe. My greatest fear is that this won't happen until the anger becomes so pervasive that it explodes in a wild orgy of violence.

I was a child when America exploded in mass rioting after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It seemed that anger spilled into the streets of almost every major American city. My mother was a Head Start teacher who worked in the slums of Kansas City, Missouri. My father, a judge at the time, sent a police escort to bring her out before the neighborhood in which she worked nearly was burned to the ground.

If the American people don't wake up soon enough to demand change peaceably, the day will come when the frustration, fear, and desperation becomes too much for many and they will demand change through an orgy of violence not unlike what we see taking place in Greater London.

As Lao Tzu wrote in Verse 74 of the Tao Te Ching,

If men are not afraid to die,
It is of no avail to threaten them with death.

In this same vein, when the people feel they have nothing to lose, that is when they will come out of their homes to burn down their own communities.