By Moh Bloggs
"Damn you all to Hell" is the cry from Charlton Heston at the end of the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. Tired, bruised and ultimately broken, Heston's character has just realised that it wasn't the apes to blame for the destruction of Earth, but actually the Humans. In perceiving a threat and blaming an enemy for something that his own kind had done, British society today is going much in the same direction. One that future generations will be damning us to hell for - not for the things we did, but for the things we didn't.
Whilst the country is gripped by a rising sense of fear that it is drowning in it's own societal ills, the debate and spotlight is placed on wars abroad and a perceived ideological threat at home. Incidents such as the shootings in Liverpool and London will for a time create a discussion point but rarely a healthy debate as to the future of the society in which we live. It is clear there are deep-rooted problems in modern life, which are creating a younger generation obsessed with guns, gang culture and the pursuit of a super ASBO.
The thing that will destroy British society is not an "evil ideology" as Blair kept on telling us, but British society itself. The refusal to accept that there is something wrong in the way modern society operates and thinks and lives will lead us all to doom. Just as the 2001 re-make of the Heston classic was heavy on style and image, it offered very little in the way of substance. Likewise, Capitalism is all very pretty but scratch beneath the surface and it displays the fruits of a failed society as in Britain.
The idea that depravation in inner-city areas leads to a sense of isolation and ultimately to criminality in our youth falls down upon closer examination. With most of the population of the third world living in deprived and hopeless conditions, problems such as those found in the UK are not prevalent there.
The behaviour of a society is based on core intrinsic values, which are indoctrinated to them from a young age. The fact that a child in somewhere like Afghanistan will at the age of ten collect pieces of waste paper all day on his donkey cart, and then sell them to the re-cycling plant for £1.50, which he will then give to his parents for the upkeep of the house, is unthinkable in a materialistic society such as the UK where the answers to lifes problem aren't found at the bottom of pile of waste paper but at the barrel of a gun.
Furthermore, a recent Unicef report stated the UK is the worst place in the developed world to raise children shouldn't be taken lightly. The government's screams of "not me guv" - with a smoke screen of old statistics put up to try and reject the findings - will not make the truth go away.
In the months to come there may be promises of government funding for more local grassroots projects in our inner cities but this isn't the solution to the problems of today. We must have an open debate as to why this is happening, why young men in one of the richest societies in the world, afforded all the opportunities of free education and self betterment, reject this to live a life of excess and broken dreams. It's not just boredom , lack of love and poverty that produces these men but it's also traits such as greed, selfishness and immorality, traits all too prevalent in the Capitalist societies of today.
The six elapsed years of the 21st century have been in the most part, filled with the pursuit of an ideology threatening our "way of life" (as Tony Blair liked to call it), yet in those years the ills of the ideology at home has manifested itself in the Soham Murders, the rise in youth crime, the introduction - and the quite speedy uptake - of ASBOs, years wasted, a generation lost and still no way out.
The saying goes "adversity introduces a man to himself" so I guess it's time to wake up to the real Britain because what we have been introduced to paints an ugly picture of what we have become. As for the evil of the ideology abroad, there is much Britain as a society could learn from the countries we invade and "liberate" because in adversity the man can be quite proud of what he sees.
It wouldn't be surprising if future generations look at the degraded societies in which they live and damned us all to Hell - maybe it would be a better place than what we helped create.
