From Matt Davis at
The Lens:
After plenty of research, reporting and countless conversations on the riots in England, it is my considered opinion as a native Englishman with dual U.S. citizenship, that sometimes, weird things just happen, and that the riots in England were just that: weird.
I arrived back in Blighty on August 20 for a long-planned vacation, burdened with a question many Americans had asked me: What was with those riots, anyway? Somehow, the more people I asked, the more the question came to feel basically unanswerable.
That’s not to say there is no merit in the many theories being put forward. Some of them, anyway.
Case in point. On August 10, the British newspaper, The Independent, ran an editorial under the headline: “Britain has experienced its Katrina moment.” On the same day, a photograph of my hometown ran on page one of The Times-Picayune with the caption: “A building burns Tuesday in Croydon, South London.”
Matt is a transplant from South London, Croydon specificaly, who so far as I can ascertain, moved to the US, because his South London accent would never, ever be considered posh 'over there', but 'over here', any English accent sounds posh. (Just kidding!, and aren't we glad to 'ave 'im)
Matt continues:
I considered calling The Independent to ask why its editorial writers had chosen to diminish the experience of disaster victims in my adopted city with such a glib and ridiculous reference to Katrina. Yes, British Prime Minister David Cameron was lost in a Bush-like moment of political disengagement when the disaster struck. But what’s next? Describing a leaky dishwasher as a Katrina moment?
When Matt returned to Croydon, he walked the ruined areas with his high school friend, and they discussed the reasons for the rioting. Was it a race thing? Was it a class thing? Was it the have-nots getting back at the have-mores? In the end, he comes up short. The best he and his friend can come up with is 'weird'.
Matt tells of a conversation with 'a man in a suit' in Croydon:
“I think we’ve created an underclass,” the man said, when I asked him what he thought had happened. “There’s too many people without fathers, and there’s no structure. What bothers me is we have to spend taxpayer money to babysit these people to give them places to play, otherwise they do this.”
He was affable, perhaps a little conservative by English standards, but then his tone changed, and so did the look in his eyes.
“What we really need is a good war,” he said. “Send ’em all to the front and they’ll all get shot. The Nazis had the right idea.”
Oof! We have that kind over here, too.
I confess I'm intrigued by a South London transplant living and writing in and about my beloved city of New Orleans. I'm sure Matt has more than a few experiences of two countries divided by a common language and of misunderstandings due to cultural differences, as the wedding comparison story which he relates in his post demonstrates.
Read his entire post. I hope I have not gone beyond fair use. Sometimes I get carried away.
