Riot Voyeurs

That's the thing about a holiday, you get so much time to watch telly and surf the Net.
Like many I was glued to the riots yesterday - on the telly, not in real life. In prayerful pain, I hope. Not voyeurism. They were places I love that were being set on fire.

Unlike many I wasn't passing on information today about where all the riots were kicking off. Or weren't, in fact. If I believed what I saw on social networking sites today, I would have thought that Bedford, Luton, Milton Keynes and Wellingborough had all been entirely dismantled brick by brick by tea time. Last I heard none of this was true, and the area is in much the state I left it - maybe not always a great sight, in parts, but certainly no worse than last Saturday. Although apparently at mid-day a group of riot police were wandering round Furzton Lake - not a place known for large-scale trouble. They may have been there for the 2 for 1 deals at the pub.

Some of it seems to be the kind of hapless passing-on of information that causes people you otherwise thought  sane, to pass on shocked emails or Facebook links of blasphemous plays that don't exist, or children who went missing 12 years ago. Some of it is people trying to help in a gormless kind of unthinking way. Some of it is clearly people trying to be funny - although I'd argue funny peculiar rather than ha-ha. And some of it is people genuinely trying to scare others.

And I suspect some of it is people passing it on with a kind of cheap thrill at passing on the name of a place they know, with the word "riot" in the same sentence. They've been watching the Middle East on the news, assumed that's just a kind of video game, seen the same in London and they're now thinking the same video game may be going on near them. In the process they're scaring other people, and they may be unwittingly inciting the thing they're warning against.

Riots are bad things where people get hurt or killed, and real property gets damaged. They're not fun and they're not games. Don't get cheap thrills on them. And if you're not sure about what information you're passing on, don't pass it on. You're helping nobody and you're probably making it worse.

This has been a completely wasted message. But you can only try.