Violence is not the answer. It never really was, it never really will be.

It all started with a small riot in a middle-class multiracial bourough in northern London. Within three days, not only was the whole city of London in chaos, but according to an article on Time.com, the riots spread to Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham. There suddenly emerged a national crisis.

Flames spread throughout the cities as rioters torch everything that comes their way. But it doesn't just stop there. Rioters are breaking into people's home, looting stores (especially clothing and shoe stores--LOL), and attacking police lines (who have epically failed to stop the spreading of the violence). So many are being injured and thousands of emergency calls from all around the capital are coming in about spontaneous violent eruptions.

What are these rioters hoping to get out of all this violence? Apparently, the main cause of these riots started with the shooting of alleged drug dealer Mark Duggard. His mother was protesting around a police station, demanding to know why an officer shot her son (apparently, he was shooting at the police). The family eventually left but get this--that's when the riots started. They were cars being blown up, fires being started, stores being broken into, etc.

 ...And all for what? Some criminal who was part taking in risky behavior that finally caught up with him? I'm not saying Mark Duggard deserved what he got; but let's be perfectly honest, none of those so called "rioters" in the street probably know why they're rebelling in the first place. Instead of actually fighting for an actual cause, this seems to have become something that the youth want to get involve in for fun. They should know better than anyone that there are better ways to confront and solve a problem--if there's a problem to begin with. We should be more open-minded, more willing to come to a compromise, more understanding of a situation, and more encouraging of the other side to do the same. We know how to get our points across, and it's not hard for us to gather support with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Why do we need to take the aid of violence when we have the power of the pen on our side?

To explain the true cause of these riots requires a breif psychology lesson. It seems to me that the kids that are out there participating in all this brouhaha now are under what psychologists like to call the "deindividuation effect." This is when individual people in a big group loose all sense of their morals and engage in behavior they wouldn't normally do. We see it all the time in history; the Nazis, the Ku Klux Clan, the My Lai Mssacare. The list goes on and on. In our case, one person blows up a car, so so other people join in the vandalization until it breaks into a full on riot; and the wosrt part is, no one is thinking. They're just blindly following what others do.

So we leave you wonderful readers with some advice. The pull to conform to a large group is strong but always remember that you are an individual with a mind and thoughts. If you don't use that lovely brain that God gave you (or evolution, if you don't believe in God), you're probably going to cause a lot of damage and end up looking stupid, like the kids in the riots.

Be involved in the world and speak your mind, but, as my dad always says "avoid the radical, extremist political stuff. That kind of politics only serves to poison your mind."

Stay safe England peeps,
Hera and Naz