A couple of days ago, after my 15 minute increment of wrestling with ch 1 — which had problems I couldn’t seem to even get my mind around, let alone resolve — I went to Drudge and clicked on a link to see what was going on with the riots in England. After a cursory glance at the photos, I was about to click away without reading anything, when I believe the Holy Spirit said to me, “Karen, you are writing about a riot in Ch 1 and this is real-time info on rioting.”  I blinked at the screen. Whoa!  What a doofus I am.

So I read about what was going on, looked at photos, and listened to the two drunken girls gloating as to how they’d gotten to “show the rich we can do whatever we want.”  By now many of you have probably heard of that.  The next day, the riots being on my radar now, I was very interested in a piece Rush Limbaugh brought up  by British commentator Max Hastings in the UK Daily Mail Online called Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters  , August 10, 2011. It’s a fascinating article, some of which I’ve lifted to share with you, though I recommend you read it in entirety.

Hastings starts out as many have, trying to figure out why these people are doing these things. The first riot came out of a protest over the shooting of a local man, which as facts came out did not seem anything worthy of protest.  People who break into shops and run out with armloads of iPods and other goodies do not seem to be focused on the injustices allegedly done to one of their own. Anyway, I found Hastings’s comments fascinating, not only in their own right, but for the condition he related might be used in this novel I am currently writing. It’s amazing how much this fits with what I’m doing.

So, on with Hastings, who is as I said, attempting to come up with a reason to explain the rioters’ actions.

“Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.

“A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

He spends a few paragraphs detailing the troubles various authority figures — from adults in general to teachers to policemen — have in attempting to control their behavior.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

<snip>

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’

Sobering, to say the least.  And as I read the article I couldn’t help thinking of 2 Timothy 3:1-4

“But realize this, that in the last days, difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy (anti-establishment), unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…”

As I said, I recommend you read the entire article HERE.