Anyone who has ever read Anthony Burgess' unforgettably disturbing 1962 dystopian novella, A Clockwork Orange can't help but wonder if the author's vision of near-future England has become violent reality in this week's shocking madness and mayhem in the streets of London and now many more of England's major cities.
Speaking by phone and email to friends and family in the UK, it's sounding like precisely the sorts of sociopathic, hardened juvenile delinquents who rampaged in ultra-violent gangs throughout A Clockwork Orange, who have risen from the welfare-supported ranks of England's inner cities to rob, burn, ransack and terrorize the streets and any law abiding citizen who gets in their way.
In fact, I am still awaiting further news of a close family member who has suffered some degree of burns to the arm protecting his car from being burned at his workplace in the one of the centers of the rioting in London. Others make their way home to the outskirts of London via trains and bikes and safe routes are unpredictable.
I've heard reports of gangs swiping a baby from a flat in a riotous sweep of that particular neighborhood (mercifully returning it unharmed to its mother an hour later), destroying businesses that have been in hard working families for generations in mere minutes, ransacking and setting fire to stores, causing pubs and restaurants to shutter across the country and keeping law-abiding Brits indoors for fear of escalating copy-cat gangs storming their city's.
Parliament has reconvened for a day in its summer hiatus and the prime minister and mayor have flown back to London from holiday locales. Stratford has been sealed off to protect the Olympic structures, though this is surely one of the worst kinds of pre-Olympic tourism deterrents imaginable.
If I might add my own two pennyworth, I'd have to say that the average aged 14-16 year old English youths who clearly have free run of their homes and the country this week have no idea how cushy they've actually had it with their council housing accommodation, social security and free health care.
Now that gangs of opposition youths are out on the streets to protect neighborhoods from being any further devastated, the potential for race violence is unprecedented in Britain. It's up to the government and police forces to put an end to this, now.
As fellow Southern SoCo Brit, Lesley said to me this morning, it's hard to imagine those glorious, flag filled streets of London during April's royal wedding taking on such a sinister development.
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