Across The Pond

Some interesting commentary on the riots and such in Britain. From today’s New York Times. Read the entire piece, here:

A street of shuttered shops, locked playgrounds and closed clinics, a street patrolled by citizens armed with knives and bats, is not a place to build a life.

Americans ought to ponder this aspect of Britain’s trauma. After all, London is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, but large sections of it are impoverished. New York is not so different.

The American right today is obsessed with cutting government spending. In many ways, Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true. But Britain is now grappling with the consequences of those cuts, which have led to the neglect and exclusion of many vulnerable, disaffected young people who are acting out violently and irresponsibly — driven by rage rather than an explicit political agenda.

America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state.

Britain’s current crisis should cause us to reflect on the fact that a smaller government can actually increase communal fear and diminish our quality of life. Is that a fate America wishes upon itself?

And for an example of the total clueless apparent across the pond right now, take a close look:



America is indeed very different from Britain in many ways. Immigrants and young Brits of color live alongside institutions that in many ways are constant reminders that they will never, ever reach the highest echelons of powers – a monarchy they cannot marry into, an official-state church they do not belong to, and an educational system that in tracking children at a young age leaves newcomers never able to play catch-up. Yes, what we are seeing is the result of the austerity measures, but within the context of a web of institutionalized, systemically entrenched, and all-too-powerful institutions that ensure certain sectors of society will never ever be, all that they can be. The messages are very clear.

Here in the United States, we live with the myth of the American Dream. Not sure what has to happen here to have that myth completely shattered. But if and when it is, that’s when we might see something like what is happening in Britain.