On stepping back from the brink

It rained in the night, so heavily that it broke into my dreams. Each time that I woke it was to the feeling of being rocked by an angry sea. I woke and slept, woke and slept, like living in fast forward.

When I turned on the radio, the news was of continuing rioting across the country. It had stretched overnight, across the South West, beyond Bristol to Plymouth. It is getting closer to home. On the radio the presenter is talking to a young woman, only 17 years old and Muslim. She was born and has lived all her life in Middlesborough where last night rioting and violence towards Muslims raged. She tells the presenter about the rioters who came to bounce on her family’s car bonnet chanting racial slurs, smashing their car windows and front door. How she and her family hid upstairs because it wasn’t safe to be downstairs. Their car is written off, she says, making it impossible for her mother, a carer, to reach the young girl that she cares for at night. 

“This isn’t who we are”

An older woman, a lifelong resident of Parliament Street in Middlesborough, tells the presenter that it was only what she called ‘the privilege’ of her white skin that had protected her from the rioting. “This isn’t who we are,” she says, “we’re a welcoming community, we’re better than this.” She talks about growing up alongside the people being attacked, about her sadness at the looting of shops in a run down area owned by people working 14 hour days to stay afloat. She says how she’s noticed that many of the rioters are kids, “There are no adults,” she says, “they’re brought in from outside the area.” She says that they are a strong community, that this changes nothing, that the rioters have achieved nothing.

The presenter turns back to the young woman, “Do you feel that?” she asks.

No, she answers, it has changed something for her and her family; now they are afraid.

Where we are

In Prophet Song Paul Lynch evokes a contemporary society breaking down, a slow trickle that builds to all out war. He’s said in interviews that the book explores an idea he holds that the world is ending somewhere, locally, all of the time. For most, he says, until it happens to us, it’s something happening to others on the news. There’s a scene in the book that mirrors what I’m listening to on the radio and I feel the creep of fear. I feel afraid about where this energy and anger will take us. Is it a discontent borne of inequality, is it ignorance, fear, exploitation? Whatever its reason it feels as if it has been brewing for the longest time. And that, perhaps, now it is where we are. 

I feel a rage bubbling up, an urge to fight; to rain my anger on the puppet masters, those self-serving scions of division; the Richard Tices, Stephen Yaxley-Lennons, Elon Musks and Nigel Farages. It feels as if they are exploiting the weak, the unloved; harnessing unhappiness for their own ends. From here it looks like abuse. 

Happy People don’t riot

Happy people don’t riot. How can we reach those people, bring them back into the fold of community and connection, to feel loved and safe, valued and heard; to stop dealing in hate? My impulse is to hate in return, but we have all learned that hate breeds hate. We have instead to harness our pragmatic optimism and look for answers, for commonalities. 

I’ve watched successive Tory governments strip those most in need of support and lifelines while pedalling ideas of otherness. We’re waiting to see how the new Labour government can begin to address this legacy of austerity and division and rebuild communities, hope and sense of value, but the work feels urgent; we need solutions now; to think of ourselves not as individuals, but as a people on the brink of an ending, like Bankys’s goat teetering on the edge of the cliff that appeared on a wall in Richmond this week.

Can we step back from the brink? I hope so.

An Old Story

Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color.