Why Are We So Angry?

I was 16 when I very nearly became a stabbing victim. It was terrifying to be honest. It happened on a bright, warm and sunny Saturday late morning in 1986. I was at home with the family; mum. Dad, sister. Dad was cooking up a splendid brunch fry up. We had our front door open a little bit because our extractor fan packed in and mum and dad were concerned about the smell wafting through the house. I went upstairs to get something for my dad, immediately stumbling across a guy going in and out of our bedrooms....holding a large knife. He got angry, very angry and pushed me against a wall and pressed the tip of the blade into my stomach and continued to shout at me, saying if I moved an inch, he’d stick it in. I was stunned, frozen rigid, scared out of my wits. Not necessarily for my safety, but any member of my family who might come up and disturb him.

No sooner had he threatened me, than he legged it out of the house, knocking my sister over as he ran down the stairs. 

In 1993, 4 of us were victims of an unprovoked street attack because we were students. The classic student bashing syndrome! It was a deeply upsetting experience for us. It was a mob attack, ferocious, intense and quick. Hardly any time went by from first contact to knock down and unconsciousness. It was anger again. Envy and anger. Hate and anger. 

Why are we so angry? Why are young people so angry? Why is it that so much anger and frustration is expressed with violence perpetrated with extreme prejudice? There is a switch that has been pressed somewhere; conveniently, society attempts to construct arguments that it’s consumerism, glamorised gang culture, video games, violent films, the media or Big Brother to blame. Whatever is in our faces at that time, that’s to blame. Never do we look on the periphery, never into our own hearts, motivations, our own back yard. There’s little time and consideration afforded to one another. We drive and can’t bear someone getting ahead of us? We can’t let them out ahead of us, even though we are not in a rush or in any urgency to get somewhere and have the space to do this. We treat difference as if it’s a plague, a contagion that might ruin some warped sense of our own purity. It’s madness. Where’s the respect, the time we used to give each other to reminisce, laugh, cry, feel, express, just be decent, kind and caring human beings. It’s not just London, it’s all our towns, cities, communities that are suffering because somebody convinced us all that it’s somebody else to blame, something else that’s wrong. 

I think back to what happened to me on both occasions; it sends a chill down my spine. I’m a father to a young boy now, I talk to him, I tell him I care, I tell him I love him, that I love his mummy, that I love both sets of grandparents, that I love what I do.....he babbles back to me, but he smiles. He knows I care. It starts somewhere people, it must start here. This is a cycle that we must break and not wait for someone else to break for us.

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Never do we look on the periphery, never into our own hearts, motivations, our own back yard. There’s little time and consideration afforded to one another.