30 May 2022. Young people. Guns

The end of the future. // Normalising violence

May 30, 2022

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1: The end of the future

On the radical media site Novara Media Sophie K. Rosa interviewed some young British people about their view of their present and future. They’re not having a good time, and they’re not optimistic that it’s going to get better. Here’s a few extracts from the interviews.

Abdul, 22, Leicester

My whole university experience has been online... I went to uni because it felt like the natural thing to do, and because my parents wanted me to. But uni, at least in this online format, hasn’t been a good experience for me, or good for my mental health. I couldn’t tell you what I’ve learned, I’ve kind of switched off... And now I’m in so much debt because of it.

Abdul would like to move to London, where he’s from, but he doesn’t see a prospect of being able to earn enough money to be able to afford to live there:

I don’t need a lot of money; I don’t want to compete to get to ‘the top’, and suffer the whole way. But I don’t want to keep struggling financially either, working constantly to survive – I want a better quality of life. I’m thinking of moving abroad because of this, maybe to Germany.

Amy, 22 Hertfordshire

I moved to Amsterdam to study straight after I finished school in 2017 – in part because it was more affordable than going to university in the UK, before Brexit anyway. I’m moving back to the UK, to London, soon... Back in the UK, I just want to find a job that will allow me to pay my bills and have enough money and time left over to enjoy life.

She’s sceptical about whether that will happen: “it seems like most of the jobs out there will overwork me and underpay me.” Equally, she’s pessimistic that she’ll manage to do the things she imagined as a child, like buying a house, having a stable job, or getting married:

But it’s also freeing: I don’t feel as much pressure to do things I might not have really wanted to do anyway ... I think more and more people in my generation are wanting more out of life than working to survive, working until we die. I want to build community rather than think about my life as a timeline with expectations and deadlines. At the same time, I’m fearful that precarity will mean life won’t be enjoyable.

—

(Image via NDLA, Norway}

Luke, 21, Essex

I graduated from uni last year, and my dream is to be an actor. Since graduating I’ve had a few acting jobs – apart from that, I’ve gotten by on Universal Credit and stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s... They say we’re experiencing a once in a lifetime economic crisis – but this is my third or fourth, and I’m only 21. Me and my friends aren’t making plans for the future – we can’t afford to.

Like Amy, Luke thinks that his generation doesn’t want to ‘work, work, work’—but unlike Amy, who thinks that social media is separating her generation, Luke thinks it’s the one thing they have:

My age group is considered the ‘social media generation’; social media is the only real escape we have from the living nightmare we call existence, not least the climate crisis... I do think there is a growing consensus around socialist ideals in my age group, though, because we’ve been so badly hit by the capitalist system. And the pandemic has taught us that coming together in solidarity is how change happens.

Brénainn, 17, Lancashire

The pandemic has made young people like me much more apprehensive about the future. Everything feels so unpredictable. We feel really left behind by politicians, often used as a political football. Me and my friends feel disillusioned with the whole system, and played by the government. People say ‘anti-social behaviour’ and petty crime has gone up among young people – but a lot of that is due to the massive increase in child poverty and relative poverty among young people.

Brénainn is in the Sixth Form, and had a part-time job at the supermarket Tesco before he was made redundant recently. He had been planning to go to university but is thinking twice about that as costs are going up. Like Abdul, he is thinking of leaving the country.

The UK feels like a decaying country. I don’t see a future for me or many other young people here. The capitalist system is what has us in this trap, and I do think young people are coming to realise this – but the system itself also makes us resistant to and fearful of change. As more and more people become desperate – including because of the climate crisis – eventually people will become so disillusioned that they will demand something else.

There’s something about all of this that feels a bit like Mark Fisher’s critique in Ghosts of my Life, following Franco Beradi—that one of the effects of neoliberalism has been ‘the slow cancellation of the future’. This was a cultural critique as much as an economic one, but this cancellation is also associated with “a deflation of expectations.” But this “deflation” is also a cultural problem—there are fewer narratives about change, and less cultural energy to infuse them.

2: Normalising violence

When the Sandy Hook massacre happened a decade ago I had responsibility for the blog of a small consulting company with offices in both the UK and the USA. An American colleague, Jeff Yang, mentioned that he and his son, then aged 9, had written a cartoon strip that compared guns, and their regulation, to cars.

It seemed to me that it said something relevant about the problems of American gun culture, and so I published it on the blog. It didn’t stay up for long. An email arrived from one of the American executives—who, for clarity, was appalled by gun violence—saying that the cartoon might cause some problems with some of our US clients.

As it happens, I ended up republishing it on my personal blog, with Jeff’s permission, so you can judge for yourself whether it was controversial or not.

I learned that however strange you think the US is, it’s stranger than that.

(Photo by Wayan Vota/flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Obviously all of this was brought to mind by reading about the Texas shootings last week. The most provocative piece I read was in Michael Tomasky’s weekly newsletter at The New Republic (sadly not available in an online version) where he writes about gun violence as a structural part of American society. He argues that mass shootings were once random events (as in ‘infrequent’) but became regular or routine occurrences in the 1980s:

All these years and bodies and dark changes to this country’s character later, I draw a different conclusion. This is no longer random at all. It is happening, over and over, because certain people who very obviously have the power to try to stop it are refusing to do so and letting it happen. That isn’t random. This is violence with a cause and an explanation..

I think he takes his argument a little far, since he describes this as ‘fascist violence’, while also being careful to distinguish contemporary America from Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain. As he says, he’s not going to be arrested for writing something critical of the government or the Republican Party. But all the same:

(M)ass violence is now a constant in this, ahem, stable democracy in a way it simply is not in other stable democracies. It is tolerated by Republicans and the right wing. This tolerance of such high levels of violence makes it, in essence, sanctioned by the state, or perhaps in this case, the states.

It’s more than tolerated. According to the New York Times, Republican candidates have aired more than 100 ads so far this year showing themselves using guns. Rolling Stone has some examples of these, none of which I’m going to share here.

Tomasky’s piece is hard to paraphrase, and I think it overstates its case, but it does raise the question of whose interests are served by America’s tolerance of mainstream gun violence. The Rolling Stone article, taking a shorter term view, connects the recent spike in gun ads to the January 6th insurrection:

It’s a visual reminder that the party believes Jan. 6 was a good thing , that the attack on the Capitol was a valiant effort , and that Republicans deserve candidates who is willing to implicitly or explicitly condone the use of violence to reclaim a bygone version of the United States they’ve seen slip through their fingers under Democratic leadership — to make America great again.

Mike Madrid, the Republican strategist who is a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, puts this down to the extreme radicalisation of the Republican base, in the face of wider shifts in demographics and values:

“There’s a desire to see a society that is centralized on this type of weaponry. There’s a lot of paranoia involved here, but it’s also demonstrative of a society that a lot of these members feel is out of their control. They feel quote unquote America is gone. It’s behind them. It’s already been taken, and the only way to defend themselves from whatever that boogeyman is… This is mainstream Republicanism. So once you start to move off of that, you will start to lose the intensity of the support and turnout you need from the shrinking Republican base. Radicalization is the goal.”

By the way, if guns aren’t like cars, the difference between buying guns in the US, or buying cigarettes, alcohol, or pornography, still seem strikingly different to the norms that apply pretty much everywhere elsewhere in the world, as this video (1’20”) pointed out.