Is this our ‘Arab Spring’?
Do the activities and actions that we have been experiencing in the Uk over the past week have anything in common with what has been going on over the last 9 months in the Middle East? I think they do… one thing, and that is that all these occurrences have involved people saying in different ways “We’ve had enough”. Of course it may be that many of our youth who have been running riot over our cities the last week couldn’t have articulated it in this way, they don’t have the words, or the concepts or, perhaps, the education, but they have got themselves noticed by the rest of us and we have to try and understand what they are saying through the garbled and confused messages we get.
The ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East was just waiting to happen… and needed a small trigger, the death of the vegetable salesman in Tunisia. Now we are seeing people’s uprisings in different forms in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, with attempted such uprisings in Iran, Burma, Thailand, China, and smaller events in Morocco, Algeria, Qatar and probably others that I have forgotten. Then there are other, different kinds of uprisings, or mass congregations of people who are less than pleased with how things are run in their country such as Greece, Spain, Israel, Wisconsin in America.
These are the uprisings of the so-called Western democratic countries. If you look closely at all of these uprisings they are all distinct and slightly different, all moderated by their own particular political situation, culture, national personality etc. But they are all about people wanting to address things that they see as being wrong with their society.
Sure, it is hard to make comparisons between the desperate forced militarisation of Libya’s ‘rebels’, the quiet and organised political discussion camps of Madrid and Barcelona, the desperate uncontrolled riots of Greece, the unbelievable tyranny responses of governments in Syria, Bahrain and Teheran, the mass killing of ordinary people, but I think we would all agree that these events are attempts, sometimes desperate, to change things because people have “had enough”.
The things that have horrified me about our recent riots have been, of course, the wanton out of control destructiveness, but there have been other things that have affected me. The film of the young Malaysian student being ‘helped’ and robbed at the same time, made me feel physically sick, and like many people I imagine, made me ask “how on earth can people do things like this?” There are reasons why people sometimes get caught up in such events and do things that they would not normally do. I have written another piece looking at the effects of trauma on people, causing them to dissociate thereby enabling them not to really see what they are doing (see Thoughts on the UK Riots). But here I want to talk more about the context of these events.
As I continued listening to the reports there were things that struck me, that shocked me: An interview with two young boys who were speaking so fast and in a language, that though essentially English, I could hardly understand; discussions with people who live in the areas and who can say just how appalling young people’s lives are in these areas. I began to realise in a way I hadn’t before just how much I didn’t know about many people’s lives in this country. I began to get a feel for parents who, perhaps traumatised themselves, struggle to make ends meet, living in an area conducive to youth violence and anarchy, the omnipresence of drugs and alcohol as a way of managing for them and their children, and having children who are more and more uncontrollable… in a liberal climate that says if you ‘discipline’ your child, he or she may complain to the authorities, but at the same time harbouring parents who, for whatever reasons, can be and are sometimes violent with their children; living often in difficult circumstances and collectively dealing with helplessness, hopelessness and despair.
Of course this isn’t everyone in these areas… indeed some of the perpetrators came from many other areas; I don’t know where the kids who trashed Ealing came from. But all of these kids receive their culture from us. All of us. Not one of us is not complicit in this.
I live in a beautiful flat on the top floor in Bristol, and every day during these difficult times I have felt the vulnerability of my situation (what if someone set fire to my car that I have just paid off? What if someone set fire to the ground floor flat? What if I, like many others, lost everything?). I have felt the unreality of comparing my situation with those who lost everything in these riots, as I do when I compare my life and situation with those poor, starving people in Somalia, and I feel it in comparison to the lives of many of those kids and their parents. I have felt outrage and a desire to discipline; I have found myself applauding when I saw a policeman on television whacking a kid with his baton. I signed the petition requesting the culprits be stripped of their benefits. I have felt despairing of our 21st century culture and society. I wanted to obliterate these people who disturbed my world, and many times I could feel in my body the desire not to know… not to want to understand, just wanting to exclude, punish, lock away. But… at the same time I also know that these are reactions, not responses.
We can only respond when we understand things in their context. These kids receive their culture from us. And in their own limited way I think they are saying “we have had enough”.
When the first demonstrations were taking place in Tahrir Square in Egypt I remember commenting to someone on the incredible peacefulness and organisation of the event. At one point the BBC published a map of Tahrir Square showing markers for where the food stalls were, the latrines, the pharmacy, the creche, the hospital… all temporary set-ups organised by the protesters to support their efforts. In my comments I said: “Of course one of the reasons these people can manage things this way is that being Muslims they don’t have alcohol. If we had such demonstrations in the UK it would be impossible because of the alcohol component.” At that moment I knew that if we had our own version it would be different, and it would probably have a much more violent element. And so I think that this recent youth terrorising is perhaps it.
Think about it: we live in a ‘democratic’ society, not in a dictatorship or tyranny. The things that we need to feel we have “had enough of” are not always clearly visible to all of us, and yet they affect all of us, sometimes in terrible ways. The people who live in some of these areas that have been devastated know very well what is wrong with our society from their perspective, but most of us get to live in our top floor flats with beautiful views and all conveniences. I heard on the news this morning that the next generation of university students will come out of university around £50,000 in debt. This is completely shocking, and immediately reinforces a culture of living beyond one’s means: things that I want I naturally go into debt for. And this is reflected of course in the global economic problems we all have… the world lives in debt.
The world has generally lived in this way for the last 100 odd years, having the benefits we have had by the states and ourselves going into debt… and that is for those of us who are better off. In my view the youth actions of the last week, with their focus on acquiring goods with violence are the symptom of our societal and cultural ills that we ignore and bury at our peril.
Now, what if those who are educated and understand these issues harnessed youth energy to do a proper peaceful, and ongoing protest? What if that energy we saw to destroy became channeled into real constructive protest? Of course the kids couldn’t initiate that on their own, they probably don’t have the education and ability to see what they can do, but there are so many people as we have seen from the many interviews over the past week, who do know the problems, and who do understand and who do want change. What if these events actually do trigger some similar societal grassroots shift that says: we need a new politics; we need to re-assess what we mean by democracy and how we implement it; we need to take the time and space together to consider these things in light of what some of our youth are telling us.
We have seen from all these other countries that it just isn’t enough to go on a day’s march; the commitment has to be to stay… and stay… and stay… perhaps in shifts, but that level of commitment has to be there, for real change. And if this happens… we may be able to say that these events were the birth of our Arab Spring.
One of the important components of the uprisings in the Middle East was that a sufficient number of people got to the point of having “had enough”. Critical mass was reached. Our difficulty is that so many of us, like me, have a good enough life under the current regime, we have no incentive to change it. As long as this is the case we are far from reaching that critical mass tipping point that allows the release of sufficient energy, passion and desire to really make changes happen. But critical masses do sometimes arrive very suddenly… they aren’t gradual events.
The build up is, but the tipping point isn’t. Our youth, or at least a section of it, may just galvanise us, along with the global economic situation as it affects us all over the next few years, and if so who knows, maybe we will have our ‘Arab Spring’.
About Vivian
Primarily I am a facilitator of systemic constellations, based originally on the work of Bert Hellinger, influenced primarily by Albrecht Mahr and latterly by the trauma work of Franz Ruppert. I have written a book on constellations, In The Presence of Many, and want to write a further book looking more in depth at the processes of trauma and the methodology of constellations. This blog is essentially to support that process of writing.
You are welcome to her blog
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