You Are Allowed to Enjoy This...

It is funny how being a relatively new father changes your outlook on life. I'm one of those people who generally lets the world wash over him and I am far too introspective to let external influences get to me. However, the completely senseless murder of Kevin Tripp has really gotten under my skin. I think it's probably the sad fact that another stable family has been smashed apart in a moment of mindless violence, the same with the many other fathers who have been killed by yobs. In times when the notion of a stable family seems more fractious than ever before, the thought that another child will be without a loving dad really gets to me. It's one of those stories that you can easily replace yourself with the victim because the scumbag killer Tony Virasami (it has been reported that this piece of human filth was already enjoying his freedom while on bail for a separate, yet unknown crime - oooh, could it be GBH, perhaps?) would have done the same to you if you had the misfortune of standing in the same spot as Mr Tripp. I try to imagine myself in the same position and my wife and child being ripped away from me. It is a horrible thought and my sympathy goes out to Mr Tripp's family...and to all those other fathers brutishly murdered by thuggery...

What has happened to this society that has turned us into a nation of thugs, intent on punching out the first innocent bystander who happens to have cut the queue in the local supermarket? Why do our young people seem intent on knifing each other to death? Why does there seem to be this underlying current of violence on our streets?

This is one reason I moved away from Loughton because on more than one occasion I was verbally assaulted while going about my business - most notably whilst queueing in the local bakery on a Saturday with my then heavily pregnant wife when a 70-year-old man decides to pick a fight with her. That guy actually wanted to go outside with me and fight - all because HE jumped the queue and didn't like it when my wife politely pointed out that the queue started behind us. But fighting a geriatric isn't my style - fighting in general isn't my style - I am, at heart, an old hippy. Live and let live, I say. But even here, in the Village of the Damned Stupid, there's aggression - mainly from old men who haven't got their newspaper on time. "The world will fall off its axis if I don't get my Daily Mirror by 8:30am. Grrrr..."

But this pervasive aggression is an insidious cancer eating away at our soceity and I wonder where it comes from? Do people lack that inner voice to pull them back from the edge of confrontation? Do people not realise that sticking a blade into the body of another person or punching them down is likely to end in fatality? The Missus has a theory that soap operas have a lot to blame for the increasing aggression levels in this country and if you think about it there could be some truth in it. Arguments, violence and aggression seems to be the staple fuel that turns the engine of TV soaps so maybe people exposed to think lose all reason and believe that any difference of view can be solved by a fight? And in soap land, if you do something naughty there's a good chance you'll get away with it. In the TV of my childhood, the only violence you saw was on The Sweeney when Carter and Regan beat up the bad guys, who deserved it and the message was that crime didn't pay and if you were a crim, you were going to get a smack. Simple messages from simple times. But, of course, this implies that people today who watch TV are simple automatons who copy what's shown. Monkey see, monkey do, no?

Maybe it is the dislocation of modern life that leads us down this rocky road to ruin? This is a time of cyberbullying and while we are more connected, it seems we are more disconnected from each other. Empathy and responsibilty are clearly lacking and while we have advanced greatly since those mediaeval days when we lived in huts and wallowed in the mud, those advances tehnologically, socially and financially seem to have dragged us back to our neanderthal roots. And it isn't just men who are dragging our knuckles on the floor, no it seems the fairer sex are no longer that fair and the increase in violence attacks from women is spiralling too.

I was reading a recent interview with John Lydon (ex-Johnny Rotten from The Sex Pistols) said he'd never live in Britain because it is too violent. To paraphrase him, he said that while the Americans might have guns, they were a lot more laid back and you were unlikely to get attacked while going about your business in the US. Is this an alarmist view or does Lydon have a point? Well as someone whose wandered the mean streets of downtown Los Angeles at one in the morning, lost and unarmed, I'd rather take my chances there than on the mean streets of, say, Catford.

Maybe fear is the mother of violence? And random crimes like this, while rare, unfortunately make good copy for newspapers and TV shows and just add more unease to that fear. It is a sad time to live in and I sound about 72-years-old when I think back to my own childhood of wandering the streets looking for fun, playing football and cricket in the road and not having a worry in the world about being knived to death. This isn't true for children today. These truly are murderous times.