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stella41b -> RE: What a shitt society we live in (2/20/2010 11:26:34 AM)
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I can only chime in with the Lady Ellen/Aneirin/Phoenixpower consensus regarding this country.
It's a bit different for me, as I live in London, in fact very close to the centre but it's a similar set up. I live in a triangle bordered by Battersea Park, Stockwell and Vauxhall and at weekends we get the 'okay yah' and Bridget Jones/Hugh Grant professional clones coming up from the better districts further out like Putney, Richmond, Mortlake and such.
They have local pubs in their areas but there's a difference between their pubs and our pubs here locally - there you can just buy alcohol, but here you can step out of the pub, stop one of the hoodies on a mountain bike (and they're like buses or taxis) and buy drugs.
It's generally the same I guess, to (1) get off your face (2) get out of your head and get involved in sex, violence, or whatever. Throw in a party, a DJ with some really cheesy music, some tuneless singing, whooping, arguing and 'giving it the large' and you have what a lot of young people today regard as 'fun'.
I'm British, born in the North of England, grew up in Glasgow, I spent a dozen years or so in Eastern Europe and even after coming back three years ago I cannot get used to what England has become. I feel not much different from the Polish migrant workers who arrived with me and feel I have a lot more in common with foreign or European migrant workers.
I've travelled out of London on a number of occasions to towns which have been transformed around shopping centres and Toytown style High Streets with chain stores which are similar in some respect to the High Street/High Road shops found in London, but without the ethnicity, the shops selling 'Pasta Pizza Burgers', or 'Chicken Burger Pasta' or 'Chicken Pizza Burgers' and the metropolitan village mentality specific to London.
But you get the same animosity, rudeness, anger, aggression, the same pasty faced chavs and chavettes, the same teenagers who speak and communicate in English in exactly the same way (and with the same amount of errors) as Level 2 intermediate foreign students of English, the same ignorance, the same apathy, and the same glaring lack of a sense of personal responsibility.
However you would be mistaken to think that this is all of society - it isn't. Society is made up of people, and 'people' is made up of individuals. What I have described above are some of those who make up society. There appears to be a greater number of Brits, most older, who are pissed off with this, but who - for some reasons or logic which escapes me - appear to be putting up with it.
There's an even greater majority of Brits who haven't changed much, they're decent, friendly, openminded types, they're still around, living their lives, and I would wager that this state of affairs has become such in this country because we are so openminded and tolerant as a society, it's now becoming such to our detriment, we realize this but we lack the unity and social cohesion to do anything about it en masse.
However it's been fuelled more by the Internet, the media, development of mobile phones, by celebrity culture and having role models as Pete Doherty and Amy Whinehouse - musicians that would be musicians if they could just lay off the drugs and stay out of court long enough to come up with a decent album. Indeed we've come a long way since the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and artists such as The Who, Hendrix, Bob Marley etc who could take a shit load of drugs and still come out consistently with brilliant music.
There's a lot of people out there I guess who've created so many personas, online, real time, whatever that they've lost sense of who they really are or who are ashamed of who they are or are angry with what their lives have become. Wouldn't be so bad if not for the unrealistic expectations they have inspired by the media, reality TV et al.
My take on it is that the chickens are coming home to roost after Thatcherism and Blairism. Britain isn't getting it on a plate any more, which is hard for many here to accept, and we can't continue living in the past on our delusions of grandeur and pop celebrity culture. It's time to wake up, smell the coffee, regain that sense of personal responsibility and roll up one's sleeves and start grafting like the rest of Europe.
The changes are coming, and there's going to come a day when the disaffected majority are going to come together and say 'Fuck this. Enough is enough.'
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