Civil unrest never has a single, simple meaning. Hell, we now celebrate Bastille day. But when Paris was stormed many a thief took advantage of the situation to rob houses and businesses. In civil disturbances you get the revolutionaries and the tag-alongs looking to light shit on fire. It’s simply reckless to make confident claims about events that are spread across an entire country this quickly.

In Britain over the past few days there have been riots, obviously. Crowds of people have set buildings, cars and buses ablaze. Many shops have been looted. And in a few cases people or cops have been attacked. Clearly all bad things, but when can you get a group of upset people together and not have bad things happen? Does that mean that we can jump to the conclusion that it’s all just “mindless?”

Clearly the riots are not apolitical. The trouble began on Saturday night when protesters gathered at Tottenham police station to demand that the police explain the circumstances in which a local man, Mark Duggan, had been shot dead by the police. Another black Londoner dead at the hands of police = a deeply political matter.

Lo and behold. The British government is making the situation out to be anything but political. But not many people mouthing the conventional wisdom have much firsthand experience of being young and poor in Britain’s inner cities. Hell, they don’t even know what it’s like to be under the age of 30 in the modern world.

Any breakdown of civil order is inherently political. Large numbers of mostly young people have decided that they want to take to the streets and attack police order, damage property and steal goods. Their motives may differ, but their actions clearly resonate from some political basis. Sure adrenaline and crowd mentality play into their actions, but the willingness to act must be explained. Perhaps it would be wise to ask them what they were thinking before reaching for phrases like “mindless violence”. Maybe we’d learn something.

But, we couldn’t possibly “learn” anything from a lowly group of “youths” could we?

There is no single meaning in what is happening in London and elsewhere. But there are connections that we can make, and that we should make.

There are major problem with youth unemployment in the UK and in the US. There have already been cuts in services for young people. Education systems in low income areas is shockingly bad and simply embarrassing. Young people can’t afford adequate housing. Economic inequality is at startling levels. And all of it is the fault of the government and an older generation that voted for and supported politicians that have fleeced the middle and lower class.

The UK, as I mentioned, is not alone here. You could quite easily throw the US in the same boat. They should have known that government policy would lead to disaster, they probably did. It’s not their gated community being smashed to pieces, it’s not their Oxford graduate that they setup with a posh job running the streets.

They should have known that their policies would lead to disaster. And if they didn’t know. Who then is mindless?

The fact of the matter is, a seemingly lost generation has been created. And in many ways I’m part of it. I went to a good high school, went to a good college and am now in a good post-graduate program. The frightening fact is that I may have to tack on a second post-graduate degree just to find a job so that I can work my ass off to pay off my $150,000 college loan. It hasn’t always been this way. And as hard as I try to “pull myself up by my bootstraps,” it’s not going to happen that easily. And I have it pretty good.

There exists a large portion of our society that didn’t even make it through the high school stage – because their low income school failed them. Where will they find a job? What bootstraps do you pull on when you can’t even afford boots?

Call them mindless, worthless, scum. Call them what you will.

But remember, kids don’t just spontaneously pop into life and decide to do wrong.

Whose fault is it?

Perhaps a little empathy could go a very long way.