Society is nastier and more disconnected than it has ever been
WHEN did nasty become normal?
Long before the point when five grown-ups aged between 19 and 55 decided to burn an effigy in a back garden, and chose the 24-storey Grenfell Tower as their inspiration. Someone spent time locating a box the right shape, decorating it in black tape to delineate the deadly cladding that killed 72 people, and even made little figures to stand in the windows.
As it burned, idiots shouted “stay where you are” or “jump out the window” and, to magnify the vileness, someone videoed it and put it online. Police in Merseyside are at the same time hunting yobs who put a lit firework in the pocket of a homeless Army veteran. Never mind the harm it might cause – what were the chances he was a former soldier, who may have far more fear of explosives than anyone else?
And now we’ve had 250 people, many of them teenagers, stabbed to death in just 11 months. It’s been blamed on county lines drug dealers and violence in the capital, but perhaps it can be linked to the same normalisation of nastiness.
We live in a society that is more disconnected than ever before. Our neighbours are at arm’s length, our families the other side of the country. Social interactions increasingly happen in a virtual world, with friendships, enmities and love affairs starting, flowering and ending online.
The disassociation has been used for votes by politicians who say people not like “us” don’t count – that the homeless are a drain, social housing needs no thought, and that young adults don’t matter.
Someone will shout “what’s wrong with people?” and blame the internet. But people are what’s wrong with people, and if you’re going to blame Snapchat or Twitter you might as well blame words, too.
Social media helps us communicate quicker and louder than ever before. We’re still cavemen. The difference is now we can see what others are doing and hold them to account.
If the 250 people stabbed on Britain’s streets were all white or the firework had been shoved in the pocket of a hedge fund boss, Theresa May would ride out to deal with it.
She won’t bother for black kids or homeless veterans, although she’s canny enough to know she had to say something about the Grenfell effigy – a disgrace resolved not by her, but by those five people walking into a police station.
The problem is not that we think nastiness is normal, but that she does. “Nothing has changed,” she says, and that’s exactly the problem.
We want young adults with hope, fireworks to be licensed and the homeless housed. We want change, and all we’re getting is nasty.
‘‘ Social media helps us to communicate quicker but we are cavemen