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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Apr 08, 2009, 18:40
Re: GROW UP!
Apr 08, 2009, 13:34
dave clarkson wrote:
Well put and when indie labels do achieve a level of success after working hard, they are often then seen as the enemy!

I think one of the biggest problems in the UK is celebration of success or appreciation of hard work. It seems to go unrecognised and is often treated with cynicism and suspect. This i think leads to bad service and laziness which for example, is often very noticable when flying into Heathrow from anywhere in the world (yes I still use flights). I don't think we're generally a nation of happy folk.

8)


We're not a nation of folk who are always happy being happy or happy with other people's happiness yet we seem to be intent on sentimentalising childhood and animals and the countryside and ourselves without actually addressing real needs. Tony Soprano would be very much at home. Fear definitely loves this place though he/she gets around a bit.

In terms of creating a fairer society I think of the UK as no more and no less than a swing-state and it is the sum of individual daily actions that will determine the outcome. Protesting someone else's failures is not "doing" any more than you can win an argument with a baton. Real change comes with concerted individual localised daily effort not forming up in massed ranks behind a flag or a marching band and then going home again to await the next clarion call while the outcome is being determined elsewhere.

While there are many serious and committed people involved there are also people who seem to view the whole enterprise of protest either as an ad hoc version of Glasto with the addition of an Urban Warfare Tent or, some kind of hyper adrenilized, state-sponsored spectator sport. Which in some ways is exactly what it is.

With Dixon of Dock Green long since retired my guess is that the same kind of protests in the same kind of economic conditions would have produced a much more violent outcome in 1984 or 1986. Not that this excuses anything but there is little question in my mind that a non violent protester would have been at far greater risk at say Wapping or during the Miners' strike. Surveilance occasionally cuts both ways.

As with the football hooliganism of the 70s and 80s (which also combined flashes of sheer brutality with a lot of running away) it astonishes me that casualties are not much much higher. Luck? Restraint? Some tactical game-playing on both sides? A little of all three?

Either way I am not of a mind to debate Revolutionary Theory with anyone on the basis of whose victims were the most deserving of a beating. And there seems to be a lot of that about.
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