Imagine a science fiction senario ... of riots
Here’s a creative writing game, invented, just by me, for you all to take part in. I’ll lay out a background/scenario, you pick a protagonist and write the story. The prize is awarded for this: Anyone who can realistically follow this scenario… AND SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF THE RIOTS
…Far, far into the future, and many, many galaxies away, on a planet we shall call Nondol.
The people of Nondol settled (somewhat) happily many generations ago, following a war, and after this they hunkered down and licked their wounds. From the death, destruction and tragedy of the war they learned a little about taking care of all their people. And so, they set up their little enviro-bubble to live in, and (sort-of) prospered. People had jobs, they had education, they had health care, they had housing, and they had the ability to form families of their own in time. Each citizen was born, and they had some kind of a place. It was a stratified society still, far from a utopia, and some Nondolians had access to far more of the resources of the society than others. But at the birth of each citizen rich or poor, there was some expectation that an education relevant to their strata of society would be provided, and following that a job would ensue. If they got sick, they would get appropriate health care to keep them as healthy and functioning as possible, and when they were finished school and in their first job they would find somewhere of their own to live. For the rich this might be wonderful pods in the coveted parts of Nondol, for the poor it might be small, dismal pods near the noise and smells of the main generating station, but each Nondolians pod was their castle, and they (mostly) settled in and made the best of it, whichever they got. It wasn’t as if a Green Nondolian expected to live the life of a Blue Nondolian anyway, or visa versa, so even those with the small, less perfect pods often made a virtue of the fact, and believed that they would actually rather live where they did than out in the scary wide open, and noise free areas that the others did.
Now, four or five generations have passed since the war. The last few ancients who remember why they chose to create the particular systems of welfare and democracy are hitting 100 and dying. There is pressure on the system from all sides. The enviro-pod they live in just isn’t big enough any more, and there aren’t enough family pods for everyone. It could be extended, but resources are scarce on the ground these days, and that would be expensive. The economy is fragile and flailing, old established industries dying, and no one is quite sure how to restore things, or create new industries suitable for the new galaxy.
There aren’t enough jobs, there isn’t enough money. The society cannot, any more, provide for the needs of all its members. Perhaps there is some latent guilt about this - but in the middle of this guilt a new religion appears which makes it all OK. A religion marked by the presence of worshiped totems - strange, mysterious, and to the outside observer, worthless items which provide little benefit to the individual possessor, leading to the conclusion of the sociologists from other planets to conclude that they are indeed religious totems of some sort. Totems which serve no purpose except the possession of the totem, but many with names than none-the-less reflect some prehistoric longing, invoking the names of the Gods of Old, from before the settlement. Names like ‘Nike’.
Now this new religion serves a very important purpose. For it separates the ‘worthy’ from the ‘unworthy’ The more totems you own, the more ‘worthy’ you are told that you are, and the fewer totems you own, the less worthy.
Does the society need to take care of those now without jobs, without homes, without education, without health? No, for they are totemless, and unworthy, or so they are told. Come back to us when you have totems, for without them you are not a true Nondolian. And so, those without jobs, without homes, without education, without health, pursue, not the necessary things they lack … but the totems of the society. But no matter how many they gain, it never really makes a difference, because the totems are not real, they are just products produced in factories, keeping the rich rich, and the rich themselves, despite being the producers of the totems, do not actually value them. Behind their hands they are sneering at the poor, who they have so successfully conned into their totem-hunts.
But things continue to get worse. The chances of a young Nondolian born in the last 20 years to ever have their own pod evaporate, to the point that they are told to no longer expect it. It was always a right on Nondol to a pod of your own, but that right is taken away.* At the same time, your own pod is, more than ever, totemised. Anyone without a pod of their own lacks totems, and is not a worthy member of this society, to blame for their own misfortune through lack of totems
The way in which health care is provided changes dramatically. With the rigours of war long over, and the wealthy staying wealthy, the nature of recognised diseases changes. The healthy, wealthy old present new challenges to doctors, and doctors throw themselves full-tilt into the task of learning about the maintenance, management and treatment of these diseases to give the healthy, wealthy, old even more allotted time span. This creates a huge drain on already massively strained resources and savings must be made somewhere. Health care for the young poor is the obvious target, and is rapidly scaled back. Simple, easy to cure illnesses that predominantly affect poorer young people and make huge differences to quality of life are now left untreated. Health becomes, in and of itself, a totem, and the unhealthy, just as the unhomed, are seen to be to blame for their own predicament, as they are seen as ‘too stupid’ to make the ‘lifestyle adjustments’ that are required for some health - the health of the wealthy old. **
Meanwhile, desperate to hold on to the jobs for their own, the wealthiest of the Nondolians are forced to look down the class scale for work. There are no longer enough brilliant jobs, so they want the merely good jobs for their own sons and daughters. The parents with the good jobs settle for preparing their offspring for the adequate jobs, and those in adequate jobs send their kids into crappy ones. As for the people in the crappy jobs? Sorry about that, there will be nothing left for you, or your kids. How is all this achieved? It’s done by a clever little idea called *professionalising*. Every job required incrementally higher levels of education to get into, giving the ruling elites more and more control over the scarce resources of employment. But there is a further catch in the tail. At the same time that young people now need to undertake 3 or more years of university education for working class jobs that they could previously have entered with no qualifications, education is taken away from them. To go to the university and get the right to work, the young person must enter a form of slavery where they will have to pay, and pay, and pay again for what they have be duly given, further ensuring, as if further obstacles were even necessary, that they will never have a pod of their own, or a family of their own, or a hovercraft to nip to work in of their own. And they will certainly never have the wherewithal for any of the culturally important totems. ***
Meanwhile, a division between generations have been artificially created. Nondol is a society that has become mindnumingly terrified of its own young people. It preaches more and more social control, stricter parenting, firmer schools, and a generation gap is created that is almost**** without precedent. Parents are told that it is not their young off-springs class, or race, or gender, or poverty that is the problem, but the fact that they are ‘the yooffs’, and ‘the yooffs’ are inherently scary. Older generations have never faced the uncertainty and futurelessness of the young, not for over 100 years, and any emerging empathy is often roundly squashed by further rhetoric about the lack of discipline and respect of these dreaded ‘yooffs’.
So there you have it. A society with an entire generation without a future, without any conceivable chance of getting the housing, the health care, the education or the employment that they need just to survive. A culture and education system that not only fails to teach young people to think for themselves, it dramatically stomps on any such emerging capacity. An entire generation taught that ‘because I’m worth it’ they must always measure their own value in the possession of meaningless totems, holding little if any value in skills or expertise. Raised in a therapy culture which sees their own rights to not be upset or disrespected by others as inherently more fundamental than right to housing, health care, or even food or water - only no one is respecting them, or valuing them either. And so, initially, the turn inwards. Post code wars happen. The guy from the next street over didn’t respect me or my totems - I’m gonna stab him. But then, one day, they learn that they are stronger together… and Nondol burns. Together they are stronger, together they get more respect. Entire shops can be looted for totems, and then burned to the ground (and while the boys rob runners, the you-tube clips show us, their sisters are looting bags of rice from supermarkets, but the analysis of this is sadly silent, let’s all keep pretending that it is only senseless totems that are being stolen)
And so, the competition begins. This is our creative writing senario laid out. Your task is to stop the riots, quell the flames, and bring Nondol back to some kind of calm using a realistic and believable storyline. You may generate any protagonists that you wish, and create leaders … if you take a gramscian Marxist view you may believe that no matter how uneducated a community, organic intellectuals will emerge capable of theorising their oppression and offering leadership, but you must also remember that this will take time, and the mainstream media will actively act against such emergence. Any individual protagonist will have their own specific back story, and many within the system, such as police officers, teachers, social workers, academics etc will make possible heart-warming protagonists with some solutions to offer, but ‘the system’ that they work within will remain an entity with a life of its own, protecting the current power holders, so any sweeping plot lines that put the police or the army rioting on the streets with the kids will loose you major points as totally unrealistic
*At a Youth work conference last year, research was presented that a single, unmarried, childless person without a disability who went onto the housing waiting list in London would be allocated sufficient points to get them housing in a staggering Two Thousand years, if they could only find out how to stay alive long enough
*Under the age of 35 young people in London now receive assistance towards accommodation not to their own home, or even their own room in a shared home, but now only towards a shared room in a shared home. http://www.centrepoint.org.uk/media/11152/shared_room_rate_briefing.pdf
** Serious complications of tonsillitis, a simple infectious disease, are rapidly on the rise in the UK. Like many illnesses, this is a closely class-related illness, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to develop it. Each bout may last from a week to a month, causes flu-like unwellness, high fever, inability to consume foods or even drinks, days off school or work, and can lead to partial, incremental hearing loss as the infection can do permanent damage to the ears as well. Kidney failure can arise when fluids can not be consumed over several days. As a child prone to tonsillitis reaches adulthood potential complications rise. Tonsils can swell dramatically quite fast, leading to obstructed airways, and death within a few hours.
Current NHS guidelines to all GPs are to NOT treat tonsillitis, because SOME are viral infections, and no one can have their tonsils out until they have had more than SEVEN infections in less than 12 calendar months. Think of the child form working class home, and the criticism made of the mother when the child misses more than SEVEN weeks of school every year due to one illness, but nothing will be done http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14415646
***The class, race and gender impacts of this are not inconsiderable. A white, upper class, Oxbridge educated male may possibly enter a job that would have always required higher education, and earn sufficient to pay sufficient to pay off the debts without too much pain. But what of the young, working class black girl? If she wants work, and doesn’t want to be a hairdresser or beautician then she is probably thinking about becoming a teachers aid, a care assistant or a youth worker (Not a teacher, or a nurse, note, but an aide). But to do this, she needs a degree, in these newly professionalised areas … and still she will only ever earn at about exactly the cut off point for repayments of loans, so for all her early career when she is in her 20’s and 30’s she will have no way of ever taking on a mortgage, affording a proper maternity leave, etc, as she will be repaying what will seem to her to be crippling loans. AND SHE HAS VIRTUALLY NO OTHER CHOICE. Her brother can still choose from an ever shrinking but none the less existing range of occupations for similar income level that will allow him to skip university, and a middle-class young person oozing cultural capital might find a way up a career ladder without a BA, but she does not have access to these things. This is, in short, a 21st century form of slavery, endenturing people into working for nothing
****It is interesting that, at the turn of the last century, the UK went through a similar period of terror at its own children, as is being seen today. Parenting manuals written in 1910 bear striking similarities to those being churned out today. See, for example, the book ‘Dream babies’ written by Christina Hardyment for some brief discussion of this
…Far, far into the future, and many, many galaxies away, on a planet we shall call Nondol.
The people of Nondol settled (somewhat) happily many generations ago, following a war, and after this they hunkered down and licked their wounds. From the death, destruction and tragedy of the war they learned a little about taking care of all their people. And so, they set up their little enviro-bubble to live in, and (sort-of) prospered. People had jobs, they had education, they had health care, they had housing, and they had the ability to form families of their own in time. Each citizen was born, and they had some kind of a place. It was a stratified society still, far from a utopia, and some Nondolians had access to far more of the resources of the society than others. But at the birth of each citizen rich or poor, there was some expectation that an education relevant to their strata of society would be provided, and following that a job would ensue. If they got sick, they would get appropriate health care to keep them as healthy and functioning as possible, and when they were finished school and in their first job they would find somewhere of their own to live. For the rich this might be wonderful pods in the coveted parts of Nondol, for the poor it might be small, dismal pods near the noise and smells of the main generating station, but each Nondolians pod was their castle, and they (mostly) settled in and made the best of it, whichever they got. It wasn’t as if a Green Nondolian expected to live the life of a Blue Nondolian anyway, or visa versa, so even those with the small, less perfect pods often made a virtue of the fact, and believed that they would actually rather live where they did than out in the scary wide open, and noise free areas that the others did.
Now, four or five generations have passed since the war. The last few ancients who remember why they chose to create the particular systems of welfare and democracy are hitting 100 and dying. There is pressure on the system from all sides. The enviro-pod they live in just isn’t big enough any more, and there aren’t enough family pods for everyone. It could be extended, but resources are scarce on the ground these days, and that would be expensive. The economy is fragile and flailing, old established industries dying, and no one is quite sure how to restore things, or create new industries suitable for the new galaxy.
There aren’t enough jobs, there isn’t enough money. The society cannot, any more, provide for the needs of all its members. Perhaps there is some latent guilt about this - but in the middle of this guilt a new religion appears which makes it all OK. A religion marked by the presence of worshiped totems - strange, mysterious, and to the outside observer, worthless items which provide little benefit to the individual possessor, leading to the conclusion of the sociologists from other planets to conclude that they are indeed religious totems of some sort. Totems which serve no purpose except the possession of the totem, but many with names than none-the-less reflect some prehistoric longing, invoking the names of the Gods of Old, from before the settlement. Names like ‘Nike’.
Now this new religion serves a very important purpose. For it separates the ‘worthy’ from the ‘unworthy’ The more totems you own, the more ‘worthy’ you are told that you are, and the fewer totems you own, the less worthy.
Does the society need to take care of those now without jobs, without homes, without education, without health? No, for they are totemless, and unworthy, or so they are told. Come back to us when you have totems, for without them you are not a true Nondolian. And so, those without jobs, without homes, without education, without health, pursue, not the necessary things they lack … but the totems of the society. But no matter how many they gain, it never really makes a difference, because the totems are not real, they are just products produced in factories, keeping the rich rich, and the rich themselves, despite being the producers of the totems, do not actually value them. Behind their hands they are sneering at the poor, who they have so successfully conned into their totem-hunts.
But things continue to get worse. The chances of a young Nondolian born in the last 20 years to ever have their own pod evaporate, to the point that they are told to no longer expect it. It was always a right on Nondol to a pod of your own, but that right is taken away.* At the same time, your own pod is, more than ever, totemised. Anyone without a pod of their own lacks totems, and is not a worthy member of this society, to blame for their own misfortune through lack of totems
The way in which health care is provided changes dramatically. With the rigours of war long over, and the wealthy staying wealthy, the nature of recognised diseases changes. The healthy, wealthy old present new challenges to doctors, and doctors throw themselves full-tilt into the task of learning about the maintenance, management and treatment of these diseases to give the healthy, wealthy, old even more allotted time span. This creates a huge drain on already massively strained resources and savings must be made somewhere. Health care for the young poor is the obvious target, and is rapidly scaled back. Simple, easy to cure illnesses that predominantly affect poorer young people and make huge differences to quality of life are now left untreated. Health becomes, in and of itself, a totem, and the unhealthy, just as the unhomed, are seen to be to blame for their own predicament, as they are seen as ‘too stupid’ to make the ‘lifestyle adjustments’ that are required for some health - the health of the wealthy old. **
Meanwhile, desperate to hold on to the jobs for their own, the wealthiest of the Nondolians are forced to look down the class scale for work. There are no longer enough brilliant jobs, so they want the merely good jobs for their own sons and daughters. The parents with the good jobs settle for preparing their offspring for the adequate jobs, and those in adequate jobs send their kids into crappy ones. As for the people in the crappy jobs? Sorry about that, there will be nothing left for you, or your kids. How is all this achieved? It’s done by a clever little idea called *professionalising*. Every job required incrementally higher levels of education to get into, giving the ruling elites more and more control over the scarce resources of employment. But there is a further catch in the tail. At the same time that young people now need to undertake 3 or more years of university education for working class jobs that they could previously have entered with no qualifications, education is taken away from them. To go to the university and get the right to work, the young person must enter a form of slavery where they will have to pay, and pay, and pay again for what they have be duly given, further ensuring, as if further obstacles were even necessary, that they will never have a pod of their own, or a family of their own, or a hovercraft to nip to work in of their own. And they will certainly never have the wherewithal for any of the culturally important totems. ***
Meanwhile, a division between generations have been artificially created. Nondol is a society that has become mindnumingly terrified of its own young people. It preaches more and more social control, stricter parenting, firmer schools, and a generation gap is created that is almost**** without precedent. Parents are told that it is not their young off-springs class, or race, or gender, or poverty that is the problem, but the fact that they are ‘the yooffs’, and ‘the yooffs’ are inherently scary. Older generations have never faced the uncertainty and futurelessness of the young, not for over 100 years, and any emerging empathy is often roundly squashed by further rhetoric about the lack of discipline and respect of these dreaded ‘yooffs’.
So there you have it. A society with an entire generation without a future, without any conceivable chance of getting the housing, the health care, the education or the employment that they need just to survive. A culture and education system that not only fails to teach young people to think for themselves, it dramatically stomps on any such emerging capacity. An entire generation taught that ‘because I’m worth it’ they must always measure their own value in the possession of meaningless totems, holding little if any value in skills or expertise. Raised in a therapy culture which sees their own rights to not be upset or disrespected by others as inherently more fundamental than right to housing, health care, or even food or water - only no one is respecting them, or valuing them either. And so, initially, the turn inwards. Post code wars happen. The guy from the next street over didn’t respect me or my totems - I’m gonna stab him. But then, one day, they learn that they are stronger together… and Nondol burns. Together they are stronger, together they get more respect. Entire shops can be looted for totems, and then burned to the ground (and while the boys rob runners, the you-tube clips show us, their sisters are looting bags of rice from supermarkets, but the analysis of this is sadly silent, let’s all keep pretending that it is only senseless totems that are being stolen)
And so, the competition begins. This is our creative writing senario laid out. Your task is to stop the riots, quell the flames, and bring Nondol back to some kind of calm using a realistic and believable storyline. You may generate any protagonists that you wish, and create leaders … if you take a gramscian Marxist view you may believe that no matter how uneducated a community, organic intellectuals will emerge capable of theorising their oppression and offering leadership, but you must also remember that this will take time, and the mainstream media will actively act against such emergence. Any individual protagonist will have their own specific back story, and many within the system, such as police officers, teachers, social workers, academics etc will make possible heart-warming protagonists with some solutions to offer, but ‘the system’ that they work within will remain an entity with a life of its own, protecting the current power holders, so any sweeping plot lines that put the police or the army rioting on the streets with the kids will loose you major points as totally unrealistic
*At a Youth work conference last year, research was presented that a single, unmarried, childless person without a disability who went onto the housing waiting list in London would be allocated sufficient points to get them housing in a staggering Two Thousand years, if they could only find out how to stay alive long enough
*Under the age of 35 young people in London now receive assistance towards accommodation not to their own home, or even their own room in a shared home, but now only towards a shared room in a shared home. http://www.centrepoint.org.uk/media/11152/shared_room_rate_briefing.pdf
** Serious complications of tonsillitis, a simple infectious disease, are rapidly on the rise in the UK. Like many illnesses, this is a closely class-related illness, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to develop it. Each bout may last from a week to a month, causes flu-like unwellness, high fever, inability to consume foods or even drinks, days off school or work, and can lead to partial, incremental hearing loss as the infection can do permanent damage to the ears as well. Kidney failure can arise when fluids can not be consumed over several days. As a child prone to tonsillitis reaches adulthood potential complications rise. Tonsils can swell dramatically quite fast, leading to obstructed airways, and death within a few hours.
Current NHS guidelines to all GPs are to NOT treat tonsillitis, because SOME are viral infections, and no one can have their tonsils out until they have had more than SEVEN infections in less than 12 calendar months. Think of the child form working class home, and the criticism made of the mother when the child misses more than SEVEN weeks of school every year due to one illness, but nothing will be done http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14415646
***The class, race and gender impacts of this are not inconsiderable. A white, upper class, Oxbridge educated male may possibly enter a job that would have always required higher education, and earn sufficient to pay sufficient to pay off the debts without too much pain. But what of the young, working class black girl? If she wants work, and doesn’t want to be a hairdresser or beautician then she is probably thinking about becoming a teachers aid, a care assistant or a youth worker (Not a teacher, or a nurse, note, but an aide). But to do this, she needs a degree, in these newly professionalised areas … and still she will only ever earn at about exactly the cut off point for repayments of loans, so for all her early career when she is in her 20’s and 30’s she will have no way of ever taking on a mortgage, affording a proper maternity leave, etc, as she will be repaying what will seem to her to be crippling loans. AND SHE HAS VIRTUALLY NO OTHER CHOICE. Her brother can still choose from an ever shrinking but none the less existing range of occupations for similar income level that will allow him to skip university, and a middle-class young person oozing cultural capital might find a way up a career ladder without a BA, but she does not have access to these things. This is, in short, a 21st century form of slavery, endenturing people into working for nothing
****It is interesting that, at the turn of the last century, the UK went through a similar period of terror at its own children, as is being seen today. Parenting manuals written in 1910 bear striking similarities to those being churned out today. See, for example, the book ‘Dream babies’ written by Christina Hardyment for some brief discussion of this