London was burning. Riots that began in a neighborhood where police had fatally shot a man would, over the next few nights, spread not just across the capital but to several other cities in England. In spring, images of the royal wedding - the kind of precision pageantry the Brits are so good at - had flashed across the globe. Now those scenes were being replaced by ones of masked youths burning and looting stores with seeming impunity.
We'd just arrived for our first overseas vacation with our two kids, and the first several days were a study in contrasts; during the day we did the usual sightseeing at London Bridge, Westminster Abbey and Covent Garden. Then at night we sat in the flat we were renting in a leafy enclave of the city and watched BBC and Sky TV news footage of police cars and factories being set ablaze by roaming gangs of rioters.
Indeed, as Americans the thing that struck us most was the way rioters hurling
rocks and other projectiles would advance on lines of police, only to have the
police, more often than not, retreat. Granted, most officers in England
are unarmed, but we were mystified as to how this soft-policing approach would
deter such mayhem.
My wife and I worried about the violence, but my kids seemed largely unimpressed, and as I theorized about why that was I realized they'd been raised in the post-9/11 era and had never known a time in which their country wasn't at war. They'd grown up on a steady diet of images straight out of Baghdad and Kandahar, and violence, at least of the type seen on the evening news, was nothing new to them.
In any case, a few nights after the turmoil began we got tired of being holed up inside and ventured out for some fresh air and ice cream. Nearly all the nearby restaurants and shops, fearing attacks, had closed early, but we found a small corner grocery where the Indian proprietor cheerfully sold us some ice cream bars. "Glad to see you're open," I told him. "Not many other places are," he said.
Within a few days the politicians had rushed back from their vacations to at least appear to take charge of the situation, and the paltry police presence was beefed up. This was followed by a round of public soul-searching as to why the riots had occurred, and why some of the rioters were not yet even teenagers.
There were plenty of theories, mostly focused on the idea that the mobs were part of a generation of deprived youths alienated from society, young people with little hope but lots of time on their hands. Answers were more elusive, however, since many of those arrested were middle-aged, and included a postman, a primary school mentor and a charity worker.
The most heartbreaking moment of the week came when a father issued an impassioned plea for calm after his 21-year-old son was killed in a hit-and-run incident as he tried to protect shops from looting. "I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites - we all live in the same community," 45-year-old Tariq Jahan told a crowd in the Birmingham neighborhood where his son died. "Why do we have to kill one another? Why are we doing this? Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home - please."
That same day we made a pilgrimage to Abbey Road Studios, a trip my 12-year-old daughter, a rabid Beatles fan, had long lobbied for. Seeing the whitewashed Georgian townhouse in St. John's Wood was mostly anticlimactic, but on a pillar out front where several generations of fans have scrawled messages there was a fresh inscription, trite but nonetheless needed at such a time as this, one we lingered over before we made our way back home: "All we need is love."
Originally posted on About.com