[generation next] return to the old values

Britain has a history of football hooliganism and To Sir With Love type scenarios; the U.S.A. has similar. It is tempting to put it down to some national characteristic or other but this report from Australia, of the former president of the AMA bashed with a baseball bat at an ATM, puts it in perspective:

When news such as this is reported, the immediate assumption is the thugs were young. The assumption was correct. Police are looking for a gang of six or more believed to be behind these attacks, all aged from their late teens to early twenties.

The United Kingdom has this week been shuddering at X-ray images of a 16-year-old with a knife lodged in his skull. That country's psychiatrists are studying the link between low levels of the stress hormone cortisol and delinquent behaviour.

Canada has recently introduced tougher sentencing and plans to name and shame young offenders, abandoning traditional anonymity. And in New Zealand a judge has warned of a "social catastrophe" developing from youth.

Adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg sees several reasons. He believes mass media, including video games, is increasingly violent and may twist those predisposed to violence towards the extreme. "We live in a secular and disconnected society," he said yesterday. "Kids need a moral compass, but they are living in a moral vacuum where Hollywood and the alcohol industry have more influence on them than anything else."

Three point starter plan:

1. The cornerstone is a return to the Judaeo-Christian moorings, which loosely held society and its interpersonal relations in check for decades, which Anon recently described, at this blog, as "all that junk". This is a one generation affair, depending on parents' and teachers' willingness to impart the compassionate and self-disciplinary aspects of it and also depending on other factors.

2. Downsizing everything from classroom sizes to government, in which technology is the key factor in enabling it, for example a return to the one room school, wired for the 21st century. Working far more from home, with sorties to the workplace in small discreet numbers, enabling and economically encouraging at least one parent to work from there.

3. The cutting off of the oxygen supply to the whole pornographic, violent, satanist world culture which has gripped youth today, by means of substituting exciting projects which would not be exciting to today's lost children but to the next generation, brought up more naively and in a more localized environment.

Many other things need doing but these three would start the ball rolling.