@jen_jen wrote:
1. The riots, as distressing as they are to watch, are a flash in the pan. They may have started out with a political trigger but they descended into sheer opportunism and greed. They will fizzle out when the risk of being caught (or hurt) becomes too great.
2. Britain will not be burned to the ground to be born anew. Ordinary people are sickened by what they have witnessed and have started to band together and present a united front against the rioters. They are not just cleaning up, they are arming themselves and standing strong in their communities to protect what they value…their way of life. Even if they failed to stop it, do you really think that the countries watching around the world would sit back and just let it happen? Of course not, and the outcome of that may well be less tolerable than life before the riots.
3. Even if Britain was burned to the ground, how exactly do you think it would be rebuilt? Where would the resources come from? We’d be in a worse mess than we are now, even more indebted to others.
Now here’s a moral question.
Your teenager is out for the evening and a riot breaks out not far from you. Desperately you try to contact them to make sure they’re ok. Finally you do, and they tell you they’re ok but they’re going to stay at their mates’ house tonight and they’ll be home in the morning. You go to bed relieved that they are safe. The following morning they come home with a rucksack full of electrical equipment, jewellery, clothes. You ask them where it came from and they grunt and say “it’s no big deal, I didn’t damage anything, it was just lying there, everyone was helping themselves so I did too. Don’t stress.”
What do you do?