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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

If you get layed off from your job, you try your best to get another job. You don't go home and beat up your wife..

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

If you get layed off from your job, you try your best to get another job. You don't go home and beat up your wife..Recessions happen every 20 years or so. Ride them out and go on with your lives without hurting those close to you...

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ORIGINAL: servantforuse

I guess it is much easier to blame Bush for everything that goes wrong in this counry. Forget personal responsibility. Times are rough right now but it is no excuse for domestic violence..

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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen

If I am denied by my society and expelled from all community, then for what reason should I conform to the laws of that society or the rules of community? If I find myself surrounded by others who have been similarly denied and expelled and who think the same, concentrated as we are into poorer neighbourhoods, is it not natural that together we might develop our own system of laws and rules predicated on our situation and somewhat hostile to those outside of it?

This latest episode will undoubtedly add numbers to those in this underclass - but we shouldnt pretend that such an underclass is something new nor indeed worse, believe that its only a problem now because we and our friends and families might well join it.

But the issue isnt about the existence or growth of an underclass so much - its more a question of psychology than sociology, and its probably something of a stretch to make a connection between the underclass and mass murders. In fact I would say that mass murders of the sort being discussed here are likely less prevalent by origin in the underclass and more prevalent in the middle classes. The common factor between the underclass and the middle class mass murderer is the sense of betrayal and injustice which characterises both and which turns both towards a path of open hostility to the greater society. The crimes of the underclass, however lesser in seriousness and the crime of the mass murderer in this are self-justified by anger and righteous revenge.

We can argue about what is right and just for anyone to expect, we can debate the nature of the social contract - even if such a thing exists but two things are certain; we all have a sense of what is right and just and we all feel betrayal, injustice, anger and a need to put things right.

And equally certain is that if one is told from a young age and then educated in the same vein to believe that if we behave in certain ways, achieve certain things and apply ourselves then we shall receive all that we desire - and then this ingrained contract is wiped away in a moment and leaves us destitute, we are likely to find it a betrayal, an injustice and a cause for anger and possibly, vengeance.

And this is the great disconnect in our modern socio-economic system - on the one hand it preaches the values of upright morality of the past, but simultaneously celebrates the cult of greed and avarice, selfishness and gluttony that is the exact antithesis. All must aspire, but all must be disappointed and at times betrayed. Our underclass have at least the advantage that they have grown accustomed to and evolved into this duplicitous worldview.

And who is to blame? Politicians who have led us down this path since the 1980s? Certainly. Bankers and financiers and lobbyists who have removed the means by which our attention to upright morality is undermined at the stroke of a pen that offshores the means by which our steady application to working hard for our dreams might have been had? Certainly.

And also every one of us that thinks "I'm alright Jack", every one of us who has no concern for anyone but himself, his own acquisition and to hell with anyone else whilst relying on the shifting sands of his own moral uprightness on which he stands - the same shifting sands in which his fellows are sinking all around him and upon which when they lash out in desperation he stands in arrogant condemnation of their "evil".

In the greater scheme of things, all this might just be our salvation as a society - to realise that either greed and avarice and selfishness are the way of things, or that we prefer a community in which social justice comes a lot higher on the agenda with opportunities for all regardless of the personal cost to ourselves.

Truly, we get the society we deserve.

E