Fear and Hope

One of the greatest blessings in my life are my friends. I get to spend my life with the kind of people who make a room brighter just by being there. The kind of people whose first response is always kindness and tolerance, who dream about doing brilliant things, who listen to the world and want to explore it. And being around these kind of people makes me want to be a better person, to deserve the love I receive from them and be able to try and return it.

Then the news is full of anger and violence and pain. Distorted people, blurring away from the cameras, fists in the air. We stand for ourselves. Not them. Out. An eye for an eye. 

And they seem to think hate is good. One EDL member was asked on twitter what the difference between the neo-Nazi's, KKK and the EDL is (by and anti-EDL protester). His response: 

"easy to prove [that the EDL are different from the other groups] ..the Kkk hate black people nazis hated the jews and the edl hate muslims.....the only connection is hate ...so"

The only connection is hate, he said. And that's okay, of course, because it's not the Jews. Not black people. And not white people either.

But I'm lucky. I was always loved and taught to love. Trying to be loving is easy. So I try to understand. Hate begets hate; people who are hurt lash back. I don't like the EDL or the BNP or  UKIP. I hate what they stand for; everything about them repels me, and as a white British Christian I'd like to distance myself and everything I stand for from everything they claim to stand for, and the associations they make with white, British nationality, and even Christianity. 

But it is tempting to hate them sometimes. To sneer. To slap back, violent protest against violent protest, swearword for swearword. I'm a guardian reading leftie; of course I'd like to shout at Farage or Griffin. I'd love to tell Tommy Robinson where he can stuff his Britain. 

But we're trying to be better than that. And again I'm reminded how blessed I am. There's the Hope Not Hate movement, the mosque which opened its doors to the EDL, the good, sensible people who stand up to point out that extremists don't stand for the majority, who rebut mad nonsense with calmly-stated facts. A terrifying amount of people are trying to make hate the norm in this country - in this world - but more are responding with hope and peace. When the EDL protest, when the terrorists bomb towns or blow up cars, when rockets fly over walls instead of over our one planet, there are people who light candles, who pull children out of the wrecked buildings, who hold talks. John Green, in his video response to the Boston Bombings, called these people the helpers:

'If you look at those videos [the Boston bombing clips] you see two extraordinary things [...] all these flags lined up together, none higher than any other... those 96 flags of people running the Boston marathon are side by side because they stand for a larger us, an us sharing a human endeavour that doesn't require a 'them'. And the flags aren't blown over by the explosion, but within seconds some of those flags do come down. They come down when people, onlookers, first responders tear down the barricades to get to the injured. 'Look for the helpers', the great Mr Rogers said about tragedy, 'You will always find people who are helping.'  [...] Think I'm cool living in a world with flags, but I am most proud to live in a world where no flag flies above any other. There are people who don't want to live in that world [...]  but I know that we are not going to give it up. And I know that we can always look in hope to the helpers, and endeavour to be among them.'

John Green,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2X1gA5apcU, April 16th 2013

I don't think I can put it better than that. 

J.R.

Let's talk about Twitter

I've had a few topics running around in my head for potential blog posts this week, but this morning I woke up thinking about Twitter (never a good sign), so I'll start with that. 


Short Twitter summary for the uninitiated who do not have Twitter (sad. sad. sad.) 
Twitter is a 'microblogging' website, of beautiful simplicity, where the user posts short comments of up to 140 characters. The user is able to follow others and be followed, send direct messages, post pictures through links, and follow trends - particular phrases which are cropping up frequently within a geographical area, e.g. the UK. #Hashtagging is used to highlight the topic or key words of a 'tweet', making it instantly searchable. And that's basically it. 


For want of a better start, some shameless self promotion! If you have enjoyed my blog, please follow my Twitter - @corybantically - where you can find obscure opinions, random rants, perplexing politics, wonderful words, and other alliterative things that pleased me less when writing this sentence. In the world of Twitter, I am a small fish (or should that be a chick?). At the time of writing, I have 103 followers and 2217 tweets. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit to how many tweets you can send, and many people pass the 10,000 mark. Archetypal 'tweeter' Stephen Fry has sent 12356 tweets and has 4,612,268 followers, as of 11.10am today. Well, I would have more followers, but I block the spambots and pornstars.*


Rapidly gaining users, Twitter has been expanding at an explosive speed. It's useful, fast, and easier to remain anonymous than on Facebook. The ease of communication has made it a key tool on 'the street'; faster than the news websites, more open than Facebook, and more diverse than any other network, it's a brilliant tool to start a revolution. Sitting in my bedroom in the free(ish) world, I have to nod respectfully at Twitter for its part in the revolutions in the middle east. It would be an exaggeration to say that Twitter caused the revolutions, but it certainly enabled them. Twitter is a great place for meeting new people, although you have to be careful. It's, quite simply, the best place to stay abreast of current affairs. Also Justin Bieber and One Direction, but you learn to filter them out. 

Yet the thing that is really making Twitter famous is the moral and legal dilemmas it throws up. We all know that the internet is rewriting the rules of privacy, but Twitter has created more scandals than any other. We've all heard about the problems enforcing injunctions as secrets are leaked over Twitter. Some people use the anonymity of Twitter to spread this information successfully, and notorious groups like hackers Anonymous have twitter accounts, yet the police are also using twitter and it has become not uncommon to hear of arrests made as a result of people posting on social networking, such as during the London Riots last year. 


More controversial are the cases where the arrest is due to action on social networking. At what point does an action cease to become a right, through freedom of speech, and become an offence? The jury are still out - quite literally. The #TwitterJokeTrial, concerning a joke tweet about blowing up a local airport has only just cleared in favour of the defendant. It's clear to anyone rational that it was a joke, but in the end, it could be construed as a serious threat. A visit from the police could have solved the issue, but instead time and money has been wasted and one poor man's life has suffered because of a flippant comment he made on Twitter. The ease with which the kind of silly comments we make to each other every day of the street can become newspaper headlines is astounding. 
Only today another Twitter scandal resulted in an arrest. One user, a young guy, sent a series of abusive tweets to GB diver Tom Daley, accusing him of letting his recently deceased father down and making death threats. It's easy enough to see that this is just an idiot with too much publicity, speaking without thinking, but his words were abusive and inappropriate. The question is whether they were serious enough to precipitate an arrest. For me, the line is whether it would have had the same outcome if he'd said it in real life, passing Daley on the street; thing is, I don't think he would have. People perceive the internet as a great big shield they can use to say or do anything (the term is trolling), but they're wrong. And so we have to create a new code of behaviour and new laws about rights specific to the online community, and they're far from ready. The internet is moving on faster than the judicial system at least can handle it. 


The other, more mild gripe, I have with Twitter is that there are vast amounts of irritating people with nothing interesting to say who amass thousands of followers by bargaining for followers with each other. The less subtle of these style actually including the hashtag #TeamFollowback or similar on their profiles, and they have very 'hipster' bio's - naming bands they like, declaring their love for tea, posing semi-naked with a caption like 'i'm so ugly. yeah'. I think you have to be a teenager to appreciate fully how this works. I'm sure their lovely people in reality, but in the world of Twitter - designed with a vague hope people will use their 140 characters to make insightful comments - these people are particularly frustrating. The ways it works is this: They ask their followers to RT (retweet) them to get to a particular number of followers, e.g. "I'm 10 off 150! RT!". They exchange 'shoutouts' with each other. So Mary tells all her followers to follow @Emma "because she's a lovely person so all follow her. RT" and in return Emma tells all her followers to follow "@Mary because she's wonderful and you'll all like her." In reality, neither of them have ever met - they just follow each other on twitter and neither is particularly interested in what the other has to say.(Then they unfollow you so that their follow count is higher than their 'following') Actually, I'm not convinced any of these people ever read their timelines - they follow hundreds, if not thousands of people, and the majority of those millions of tweets are frankly, banal nonsense. Such is the world of the internet, it's just that Twitter emphasises the sheer volume of this nonsense. 


But surely you don't have to follow these people? Of course not. And you can block anyone on Twitter who is sending you spam or giving you unwanted attention. More effectively, you can protect your tweets so only certain people can see them. I'm not a protected tweet-er - for the moment, at least - so I do occasionally encounter unwanted attention on Twitter. Recently I decided to enter a conversation with a stranger on Twitter via email. It was a lovely conversation, but after 7 years of having 'do not talk to strangers on the internet' drummed into me at school, I realised what I was doing was deeply unsafe, so I stopped replying. I've probably hurt the feelings of a lovely and ordinary person out there, but in the end, you just can't be too careful. That was hard, but the internet isn't a playground. It horrifies me to think of the way I used the internet when I was younger. My parents, quite rightly, wouldn't allow me to join a social network, so I joined Piczo, Bebo and Myspace (twice!) behind their back, and happily posted all sorts of information about myself and pictures without security controls. I have now been able to delete most of that - the Piczo and Bebo accounts are gone, and the information has been removed from Myspace. Strangely enough, the 'deactivate account' button on Myspace doesn't work, and the customer service line never answered my messages... When I've finished this blog, I'm going to go and play with my Google+ account. I love most of the Google services, like this one, but I can't figure Google+ out - and I'd like it to be displaying a little less information about myself! 


Forgive me for rambling. Having started this blog to discuss Twitter, rather than follow a line of argument, I've allowed myself to digress and procrastinate. It's now Wednesday the first of August, 13.39, and Stephen Fry still has 12,356 tweets, but has gone up to 4,617,463 followers. His Twitter is hilarious - satire and wisdom combined. For all the nonsense, Twitter is a great window into the lives of many fabulous people, ordinary and famous alike, and useful organisations - I started following Team GB yesterday! If only, like Mr Fry, my followers would increase by over 5000 whilst on a 4 week Twitter hiatus in Uganda... 
Time to send another tweet.




Do you have an opinion on this? Or even better, a twitter account? ;)
Leave a comment or send me a tweet :)


J.R. x 





* Don't let me put you off Twitter. Hey, I'm sure those spambots and pornstars aren't all bad. 

Who are you when you are No-One?

Tick-Tock. August 2011. Riots, houses burning, youths, violence. Tick. Mr Cameron uses his favourite phrase, 'getting tough on them'. Tock. The papers go wild, not us, not us. Benefit scroungers. White trash. Starkey's infamous race comments. Tick. Tick. Tick. 


I am amazed by the extremity of the responses to the riots. One article criticised this as a 'knee-jerk' reaction, a term I'd like to appropriate; in most circles the knees are up and back to the wall. The level of hatred and fear on both sides, and lack of moderation from our leaders, appals me as a human, a young person and a christian. 


As much as I would love to find an explanation and support the underdog in this, I am unable to condone the rioters. I watched with you all the muggers who robbed an injured boy and breathed a sigh of relief when projected riots failed to appear in my own town. Above all, what horrifies me most is that these people where not fighting for a cause, even if they fought because of one; they were motivated by greed, self-interest and boredom, inspired by the wrong people, morals and ideals, and causing great pain to innocent citizens for a laugh. Their actions bear no justification. This places them on a different platform for than, say, when the protests about higher education fees kicked off into chaos because they had a cause behind them even if their actions were unnecessary and destructive. 


My question is this: Why?


And by 'Why?' I don't mean what drove selfish ruffians to smash shop windows. What I want to know is why do they resort to gang violence? why are we shocked when this happens? why do we let it happen, or why don't we care until they cause trouble? why didn't people see this coming?
Why have adults crossed the street to avoid passing me and my friends?
And why are the generations that brought us up, that control every aspect of society from education to healthcare to government, negate all responsibility to the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, whose only voice is in their fists? 


I am angry at the rioters too. After all, they've just smashed a fragile image of young people into pieces, and made life harder for your law-abiding, hard working younger person like myself. But I blame has been apportioned too quickly and that once again, our 'big society' is attempting to make itself smaller, cutting out those who embarrass it. 


NEWS FLASH: These people are part of our society, like it or not. And that makes it societies responsibility to bring them back to the fold. It's time to let the outsiders in. 


'I will not always be with you.' Jesus told his followers, 'But the poor always will be.' As a follower of the God who drank with tax-collectors (read: politicians/inland revenue officers), travelled with uneducated manual workers, and made died a gruesome death in-between two common thieves (imagine the sunday times front pages...) I see no goodness, no godliness, no hope in the rejection of these people. Society - by which I include all of us, myself as well - has pushed these people to the outside. Labelled as 'chavs' or 'foreigners' or 'white trash' 'sluts' etc in the news, in conversations, in the looks we give them when they pass us in the shops or doctors, they are marginalised and only a very few wonderful people take the time to reach outside of their social spheres to these people. 


I am becoming more aware of this in my own life. Having moved from a poorer area to a more middle class area just before my tenth birthday - and at the same time, our family made the social jump from upper working class to lower middle - I have been lucky in that I escaped not only a rough area and background but also an education system where those who made the grammar schools had a future and those who made the comprehensives...didn't. Having escaped, I have become very proud of my working class heritage, feeling it makes me a commoner, one of the people, but watching the riots detached me all those false impressions. Admittedly, I have a better idea than many, especially our dear government, but now I know how little I understand what it is like to be marginalised, to suffer under a system that offers the rest of us protection, to be suffocated by money and class and stereotypes. I'm on the inside looking out, from the comfortable bubble of 'us' and 'them'... 


Proposed solution A: Let Them In.
Problems: If you listen to the rioters, you will have realised they aren't over keen on coming in. Why should they be? Society has made it rather clear we don't want them. 


Proposed solution B: Go out to them.
This is the solution all the scared, scared letters to the papers don't want to hear. It's so much easier to call for punishment and clean up our homes than go round to theirs and clean up their places, so much easier than questioning ourselves and our responsibility. 
Yet the only way to bridge the gap between 'Us and Them' is to go out ourselves, into the rough areas we like to frown upon from safety, to get dirty in filthy streets and see the world from those places....
I also like to call this solution 'community'. It means no us and them, just the people living and working together, differences celebrated, doors open, problems solved together. 

• Firstly: Who is in these communities asking them why the riots happened? I'm sure they know best: we need to listen to people who know, not just experts but ordinary people, get their knowledge heard and used.
• Secondly: Anger and looting might well be part of a moral degeneration, and kids putting their values in the wrong places. If so, than we need to re-examine the whole of society and what we teach our children. We need public-eye figures to stand up against consumerism, companies to give back more to communities, and ordinary people to show just a little altruism as part of their daily life...A little love goes a long way. 
• Thirdly: Half the kids in Tottenham come from disadvantage backgrounds. People don't necessarily want to give them jobs, they won't have had all the privileges of holidays and trips to museums and castles and all that. At the bottom of the heap the education system is pretty rubbish and teachers don't want to be there (understandably). No-one believes in these kids, police don't trust them automatically, they are the weekly victims of the tabloid press and, to compound it, poor education and financial struggles combined with the introspective, defensive communities necessarily created by the poor and uneducated to tend to produce more problems like teenage pregnancies and gang culture. Instead of solving it, we simply apportion more blame and talk about policies at high levels that never reach these people. So...
• Instead of blaming etc, we need to make a bigger effort than ever to reach out to these people. The government can make a tremendous difference by speaking out for these people, sorting out reasonable and constructive punishments (i.e. community service repairing damage done), improving education, keeping Sure Start centres open etc. Charity support is another major thing the ordinary person can do to make a big difference for these kids. But most of all, it's down to us. Not just asking our MP's this and that but changing our attitudes to people on the outside, and being creative with what we can do i.e. a successful mum's and toddlers group in a well off area might start/support a less successful in a disadvantaged area. Small things can make a huge difference as they accumulate, with everyone putting in a little: Imagine for a moment you are on a train and a 'white trash' family comes on, lots of kids, music, smells of fags, whatever. Usually the whole train sits and prays they chose another compartment. Instead, smile. Let them through, move your bag so the littlest kid can sit down...I know, reading this, you're probably the kind of person who would do it anyway, but it's amazing how many people wouldn't. It's time for a social attitude adjustment.
• Finally - these kids think that their voice is their fists. Do any of them know how to argue, how to get themselves heard safely, how to change their communities positively, or how to get their concerns heard? No. Tick. Tock. It's time to give them voices properly, hear what they have to say and educate them on a better way to say it. Education & Social Attitude changes. 

When these people finally get their voices there will be a lot of people embarrassed or ashamed by what they have to say, but those voices must speak out now, for the sake of the children of tomorrow. Heal the cracks in society and perhaps one day...

...community.

Until then: Stay strong and speak out. 

God Bless,

J.