I had a conversation with a good friend soon after evacuating to England this past February. He asked me about the ‘riots’ in Cairo, and I was quick to correct him -- protests, not riots, protests, not riots. This past week the tables turned. I have since returned to the US, and my friend in now in Scotland, a safe distance from the current unrest in London, Manchester and elsewhere in England. I emailed him, remarking that the rioting seemed senseless. His response -- inexcusable, yes, but senseless, not exactly. Touche.
Riot seems the appropriate word to describe the events in London, and while there have been riotous moments in the Middle East and North Africa since January, there has been a kind of deliberate intention behind the events there that we simply do not see in England today.
I asked my students last night what separates a riot from an act of terror. They argued that a riot is spontaneous, where an act of terror, however unexpected, is planned and deliberate. Terrorism is also explicitly political, where a riot can emerge from a general sense of frustration.
The events in England certainly lack the political organization that characterizes either a protest or an act of terror. There is no central organization attempting to coerce the general populace into submission, or overturn the existing regime. The rioters themselves appear to be the ones who are afraid -- looking into a future with few prospects, in a system where they do not feel their interests are represented.
I will confess, I have played the ‘ugly American’ while watching the news coverage, surprised and even disgusting by the slow and seemingly mild-mannered response of the English police. In America, after all, the police have guns, so you are afraid to run away from them. You should be, I keep thinking to myself, afraid to break the law. Yet the English police seem impotent in the face of what they call ‘unprecedented’ uprisings.
Then I read TIME Magazine’s article on how the Tea Party caucus was able to control the debt deal last week, and I was forced to reconsider my sense of American strength in the face of a paltry English response. If there seems to be something inane about the riots on Tottenham Court Road, at least they do it in a place where the police can respond. The United States’ would-be rioters have already taken the Capitol.
Now there is something to be said about the democratic process, seeing as rather than rioting, a largely disgruntled group of disillusioned American whites have been able to have their voices represented in the government -- whereas a similar population in England feels themselves more removed from their own political process. But to pretend that the US doesn’t face the same kinds of problems and pressures is ignorant. While I can sympathize with many of the Tea Party’s demands for more transparent governance, and cuts to bloated bureaucratic systems, holding the welfare of the country’s poorest citizens hostage while you refuse to negotiate with the other side is where I draw the line. What is worse, rather than being the voices through which the American people get the clearest most direct information on the crisis, Tea Party members have been responsible for some of the worst instances of misinformation. Their hyperbole has made them more opaque than anyone on the other side of the aisle.
The long and short of it -- the headlines out of the West make me miss Egypt. The rioters in London, and the congressional hijackers from the Tea Party caucus should take some notes from the pro-democratic protestors in Tahrir Square. They should look to places where democracy is really at stake, and consider what people in those places are willing to do to fight their battles. Perhaps then they could put their belligerent tactics aside and focus on rational approaches to affecting change.
