Riots

We have been this way before. Five hundred years ago a French social reformer by the name of Auguste Comte witnessed the same conditions that trouble us on the news today. The details were different then. Very different. But the conditions were the same.

There were no rampaging hordes of youth threatening to burn a global financial center to the ground. There were no reports of multiple suicide bombings taking the lives of scores of innocent victims. There were no airplanes to be flown into buildings filled with thousands of human beings. There were no Timothy McVeigh's or Anders Behring Breivik's going on one-man campaigns to save their world.

Some details certainly were the same. Back then there were a few individuals with lots of wealth that had been accumulated on the backs of the many who remained in poverty. They also had their slums and ghettos.

Auguste Comte felt the same way we feel today. Something was wrong with society. He could tell that society was in trouble. Sociology was his academic response to the malaise he saw around him. He had seen how science had been used to transform society physically. He hoped it could be used to transform it socially.

It must be obvious to us also that society is in trouble. By our reactions to these incidents we have declared that our society is sick. But the measures we have been proposing to correct these conditions suggest that we think otherwise. It is easy for us to blame the gangs who roamed the streets of London for these four nights in August and struck fear into the hearts of its citizenry. But this is nothing more than blame-shifting. That's a bit like blaming the river for the damage caused by the flood.

It is statistically possible for a freak storm to wreak much more damage than these young people caused. It is not the damage to life and property that offends us but the fact that it was caused by our children. We cannot understand how they could do this to our peace and quiet. I cannot help but think that they are asking a similar question. "How can they do this to us? How can they take away our chances at a good education, or a job to make a living? How can they do this to us?" Whether we admit it or not, their actions are their last ditch effort to change conditions they find to be oppressive. That is what Tim McVeigh thought he was doing. That is what Anders Breivik thought he was doing. It is not a sustainable solution to do to them the same thing they did to us, neither will it help future generations if we only kick the can a little further down the road.

We ask, "Where are the parents of these children?" Good question. But, maybe they have their own question. "Where were you when we were struggling to hold down two or three jobs so we could put food on the table for these children, and have enough money left over so I could buy for them all those glamorous consumer goods the media keeps telling them they must have? Where were you then?"

We advise our children to stay away from gangs as if gangs are an alien species? These gangs are all homegrown. They did not spring up out of nothing. They did not invade our societies from outer space. We produced these gangs. We created the circumstances in which they sprout and flourish.

We have been this way before. Comte recognized that it was a problem with collective action. He recognized that was he observed among the poor of society did not only define them; it defined the entire society. The gangs are not sick. All the groups and individuals that strike fear into our hearts are not sick. We are sick. The problem is collective action. Leadership is nature's response to the need for collective action. This is what we need today. We need leadership that will correctly identify the problem we have, and then be capable and bold enough to suggest the type of corrective action that will make these recent events nonessential. If we fail to rise to the occasion we will be this way again.