On Friday, I sat down for the evening having just shared some lovely garlic chicken stripers, a couple of pizza's and garlic bread with my cousin and partner, we'd decided to take a watch of Eden Lake, a dark tale that is only too real for today's society in general.
Before I come to the crucks ok what I will cover, everything that happens in "Eden Lake" is believable and this, powered by great use of suspense, is what makes this movie so scary, what's more it sends a message out that even in the nicest of towns, our children can be evil.
So with this film fresh in my mind, it got me thinking about four things and questioning myself as to what or how we can change the future to be more balanced in the same way as our past and what it is that drives this modern day society to behave the way it does. My questions or more like thoughts were:
- Is the crime as much today as it ever was, or is it that media channels have instant access to crime reports, with an unlimited way to broadcast the horrors around the globe.
- Are our children becoming bad because they have unrestricted and unlimited access to resources that we were once shielded from by our parents.
- Has the justice system left this country down.
- Do do-gooders really calculate the future impact of their campaigns for change, and are those changes taken to the extreme by the parents and authorities.
Thinking our my first point, I've debated this so a long time and never really concluded in my own mind if access to more news is a good or bad thing, it annoys me that our news can be dominated by stories that have little to no relevance to the population as a whole, the war for instance, for the headline news seems to be how many soldiers have died that day or week. I feel for the families a really do, but as a nation we voted for the government that sent our troops to war, as soldiers they signed on the dotted line to give their life for Queen and Country and as WAR by it's own definition will have casualties, whether human, political or environmental. It is tragic when the soldiers lose their lives in a war that has no real meaning to us, but they gave their lives protecting the very fabric of society we enjoy living in, a society that needs to be protected from the terrorists and extremists. The question though, will the war make any difference to the future of terrorism & extremism? Probably not! So does the media need to put the conflict in our faces daily, do our young need to know and see what war is from such an early age and is the amount of lose justified considering the modern military might we have today? You know that General Stonewall Jackson would have lead thousands of soldiers to their death during the Battle of the Bull Run, and thousand lost their lives on the beachhead of Normandy....
I can only say that the access to media and the ability to broadcast what is deemed at good news rather than complete and factual is one of the reasons we are heading downward.
Moving onto the unrestricted access part, well when I was a teenager (yes I know a long time ago!) the internet age was just dawning, we had very limited use of BBS services where we swapped games for our AtariST's and Amiga's, PC's were still really a business tool at the time.... How quickly that changed, by the time I was out of home and in my own place, I had my first PC, I remember it well, and AST, a massive 1meg of graphics memory and 32meg of system memory, cost me almost £2000!!
Today, parents buy their kids laptops, kids have internet access on their mobile phones (which they get when they are.... 7.... come on, what does a 7 year old need a mobile for!) Sure there are applications out there to restrict what kids can get to, but lets face it when it comes to technology, kids are way smarter than us..... And what does it matter anyway, since we go out and by them Grand Theft Auto, or Gangs Of London..... even if we don't then some other parent will have and they will get playing it anyway. But on top of that, they children have an endless array of social media outlets at their fingertips, for life blogs to virtual worlds and social connect sites like Facebook and myspace, they can become 'penpals' with endless number of people and be shielded behind a screen name to be whoever they want to be (naturally this also goes the other way and perverts can pose and young girls to lure them)
With all this access to information and resource are young minds able to develop, consume and understand at the same pace we once did.... I think not, leading them to become overwhelmed by the desire to be like their elders or take role models from the worst society has to offer in a bid to gain followers and seek approval!
And what of our justice system in the UK, what message does it send when a man protecting his home, his family and his property is sent to prison for injuring an armed burglar, or when hoodies take the life of a resident to move them along the road for making noise and only get a short detention spell, and Ronnie Biggs, let out on compassionate grounds because he is ill, what compassion did he show the person he murdered in cold blood.....
We wonder why crime is up when our courts allow true criminals to walk free with no more than a fine, you only need to watch any of the cop programs on TV/Sat/Cable to become frustrated with it all, just the other day, a known drug dealer, with a car full of drugs, no tax, mot, insurance, bald tyres is allowed to walk away from the police station, great, back to selling to the kids in the playgrounds then. And what of taking drugs, reports state that 15% of all 8 to 12 year olds have taken some for of class A drug..... 15%!!! A. how are they getting them and B. who is stupid enough to be supplying it to kids of that sort of age C. do children this age even know what a class A drug is and does to them.
Anyway, I've rambled enough and must clean up on my last point as I'm sure I've bored you a little.
Do-gooders..... ok going back to school in the 80's we still got the ruler across the hands and the real naughty kids would be seen outside the headmasters office waiting for the cane across their backside. Parents then believed in discipline, and it was reinforced at home, a smack across the back of the legs or the belt from your father, but this all changed, somewhere campaigners changed what they thought was acceptable discipline. Why, oh god knows, but we all know that after that point, stories of
children taken their parents to the authorities, or threatening to grass them up for abuse, oh yes, discipline had a new world in the eyes of the child, ABUSE! Children had been provided the power by the do-gooders to rule the roost, and authorities had to listen to the children.
Parents became powerless in their own homes, nothing they could do or say to the kids had the gravity it once had, kids did what they wanted, sad what they wanted, stayed out as much as they wanted, creating group culture on the streets, now it wasn't just parents who would fear their own children, now they feared the groups of children, these groups became armed with their weapons of choice and have become their own neighborhood terrorists.
Since they all have mobile phones, demanded now from their parents, flash mobs are the order of the day, a hundred plus children descend somewhere to do something to disrupt everyday life, to them fun, to society they have become no more than terrorists.
So well done for campaigning for a better tomorrow, that tomorrow has come and you do-gooders have created an animal that can't be controlled, police, justice and parents have become powerless... give yourself a big pat on the back.
Going back to the Eden Lake film, it sums up, quite brutally the limits that the children will go, we may watch this film and think our kids aren't like that, our kids would never do that, well take a drive out one day and take a look at what your kids are up to, when you see groups of kids acting in a way you wouldn't want yours too, think, that is probably exactly what yours is upto as well.
We've allowed for this dictatorship to happen, we are responsible for all the teenage stabbings happening today, and we are the ones who have allowed our children to become brutal in their actions against our human beings. Watch the film and ask yourself at the end, what do you think is going through his mind when he is looking in the mirror?
Is it remorse?
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