Oh, the insurrection of hungry, unemployed, and restless youth. What they won’t do for food. Except that the youth riots in Great Britain didn’t find the huddled and hungry masses with a powerful yearning for gruel, but rather for designer duds and bath accessories. Storming a Starbucks for scones would have had some meaning. Such was not the case. An 11-year-old boy entered a guilty plea to stealing a waste bin from a store –value of £50. That’s some waste bin. An 18-year-old was charged with stealing jewelry worth £20,000. Another 18-year-old entered a plea to stealing two Burberry shirts and agreed to pay a fine of £150 pounds – maybe enough to cover the costs of the designer shirts.
The degree of thievery, thuggery, and flames stunned us. There is no reason the lawlessness should have shocked us. Disregard for rules and laws has been building for some time. Couple a lack of enforcement by public officials with a sense of entitlement and ill-sourced righteous indignation in the youth and you will find these rebellious youth breaking store windows for flat-screen TVs. Great Britain is not alone in its woes – the attitude of the young people in Europe has been reaching par boil for some time. The adults have been standing around with plentiful handouts and little in the way of rules and enforcement.
For example, officials in Oslo have turned a blind eye to the “Planker†movement. Plankers are youth who ride the city’s subway system with no ticket and no worries. “Planka†(Swedish slang for free ride) is a group that pools the funds of its members for purposes of paying each other’s fines should they be caught in their fare-dodging activities. The groups’ logo shows a figure leaping over a subway turn style. They refer to their riding for free as an act of “civil disobedience†because they believe that the fares on the subway ($4.50) are just too high.
The Plankers say, “We don’t cheat: We Planka.†Freeloaders. Free-riders. Those are the terms that come to mind, but the fear of offending the youth finds the public authority that runs the subway offering this response, “I don’t think that it is our business to deal with it all.†Ah, you wouldn’t want to deal with lost revenue! The public officials didn’t opt for enforcement; they started a PR campaign with this theme, “We try not to point with an angry finger but to use a little bit of humor.†There you have it – cheaters meet mollycoddlers waiting at the ready with ‘We don’t take these groups seriously.†A lack of enforcement results in a society in which rules are meaningless. Lack of enforcement emboldens the rule-breakers. One Planker said, “Before it was something you did because you were poor. Now at least it’s something you do as part of a movement.†Ah, avant-garde cheating.
Ignore the actions of a movement launched in defiance of society’s rules, and, well, witness the consequences in Britain. The irony drips. Principled civil disobedience in response to perceived injustices, whether in subway fares or English society generally, does not garner the respect it might when that disobedience involves swiping jewelry and Burberry shirts. How very chic.
Patrice McGroarty, “Freeloaders Unite to Fight Subway fares,†Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2011, p. A1.
Jane Croft, “Boy, 11, School Worker and Teenage Students Among UK Riot Defenders,†Financial Times, August 11, 2011, p. 1.
