When presented with an inescapably relevent situation, certain people are hardwired to ignore our more pragmatic response mechanisms and instead look immediately to the purest reflection on the human condition - art - as a way to examine current circumstance. Nietzsche once said ‘We have art, so as not to die from the truth’ but I think the opposite might be true.
When you endure or witness anything, whether intensely personal or impacting on the wider world that shifts your internal consciousness somehow, the linking of that experience to something in the creative realm - a passage from a book, a character in a film, a scene from a painting - is a way of searching for truth rather than masking it. If life is just a mirror we hold up to our origin, then every artistic endeavour we undertake is another shard of glass we hope will finally complete the reflection.
So it followed that when I read about the continued rioting this morning, I thought of a line in a song. There are plenty of obvious lines from obvious songs to pick from - I Predict A Riot, Guns Of Brixton, Whats Going On, etc - but I didn’t think of those. The song that came to mind for me was by Jackson Browne. It’s called Something Fine, and can be found on his eponymous debut album from 1972. From a distance it might seem an odd choice to relate this quiet folk song to the tumultuous social unrest of the past few days, but as I watched the scenes of looters coming together to inflict violence and stamp their misguided presence on the world, I instantly heard the following line in my head: California shaking like an angry child will, who has asked for love and is unanswered still. To me, that single statement strikes at the heart of the issue of this trouble - the rioters, rather than the riots - more directly than any hastily assembsled political soundbite could ever hope to.
Were the police acting unlawfully when they shot Mark Duggan? Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Only those who were actually there will ever know. But those who caused destruction these past few days weren’t doing so out of a sense of moral outrage. Perhaps, in the beginning, those who saw the spark of an uprising may have attached their very real fear of and disappointment in this government to it. The ongoing chain of events does however point to a bigger problem as encapsulated in the words of Jackson - the young kids commiting these acts are essentially angry children, who have asked for love and remain unanswered, bending any sense of genuine injustice into an excuse to violently vent their rage.
Tolerence, compassion, openness, kindness, humilty, humour, - these are the things that we would see more of in the world were they not already so lacking. Call me a hippy, but I don’t think a five year old child taught well in these principals would be throwing a brick through a shop window to nab a new TV twenty years later.
