The side effects of the policy allowing young people to run riot has brought riots to the entire country.
For years we have pandered to our kids, allowed them to ignore the police and teachers and attacked authority figures that have stood up to them. Punishments have been reduced to meaningless in schools so our youth feel there are no consequences to their actions. The result is Riots, Mass looting and the death toll to several communities.
They are about to learn there are consequences, when no jobs or businesses return to their communities for fear it happens again. The scars will remain as no one comes to repair the damage, and the number of jobless and impoverished families will grow.
We need to stem the tide now, the government needs announce that they will name and shame those guilty, so they face the wrath of their friends and family. Any over the age of 14 need to be treated as adults in the face of the law with the consequences that come with it. We need to announce the punishments now to prevent further spread.
More importantly we need to take a long look at our society. We need to show our children that there are consequences when the consequences are minor, long before they get to this stage. Discipline needs to come back in to schools and respect for the police needs to be rebuilt.
We need a society where common sense wins, rather than instant reaction. Where when a parent hears that their child is in trouble - they find out why rather than immediately believing either side. Then stand up for the side that is in the right. In 'The good old days' parents immediately believed the Teacher or Police - now they immediately believe the child.
Neither is right, but it is the lack of consequences caused by the latter that have enabled the current problems to arise. Our society has had a habit of jumping from one extreme to the other, where the middle ground is needed, and hopefully after the dust has cleared and the rebuilding commences we will not see more knee jerk reactions but a constructive dialogue to rebuild a safer, fairer and stronger society.
1 comment:
ALL our problems,the riots, the bankers, the bailouts, da,de,dade,da was all predicted in 1975 by a systems designer and analyst. the problems are are an emergent property of the governmental regulatory system we have inherited from a hundred years ago. The tsunami of social change has overwhelmed our institutions which are disintegrated, dysfunctional and extinct. The need is to design our institutions to respond in real time; the economic systems, education and health systems, the legal system, the taxation system; all need to be integrated, communicating with each other. And they must be able to respond and act instantaneously. The scientific know how already exists to do this.
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