Mob Mentality

I find that many things in life are all about finding a balance between 2 extremes. It’s often difficult to do, but I think most people have the innate ability to get it more or less right, and it’s very subtle differences of opinion which cause rifts.

I just spent the bank holiday weekend at the Leeds Festival. It was an awesome experience, I saw a lot of my favourite bands and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but there was one thing that spoiled it, and apparently spoils it every year. After the Manic Street Preachers finished the last gig on the last night, what had for the most part been a peaceul crowd turned into a mob. I knew that there generally is a bit of a riot at the end, and that a few years ago my friends got involved in an altercation with the riot police, but experiencing it first hand, it’s nothing like as fun as it might sound to some.

It started off in our area with a tent going on fire about 40 or 50 metres away. It may well have been the tent’s owner that burned the tent, but nevertheless within fifteen minutes all the tents within a 20 metre radius had been thrown on top of it too. I’m an experienced camper and I know that tents catch on fire very easily, and with everyone’s tents so close together it would be very easy for a whole section of the campsite to go up in flames, perhaps taking sleeping people with it. I was very much on edge.

People were throwing gas canisters onto the fires causing huge explosions with mushroom clouds above them, and massive crowds assembled near the fire by us, making the explosions all the more dangerous. My friend and I were driving home and as we knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that rioting happening so close by, we thought it would be safer to drive home last night rather than risk being too tired this morning. My other friends were planning on getting picked up or taking coaches and trains the next day so they stayed, but as it worked out the rioting got so much worse that eventually they all left too.

What gets me is that I know most of the people in those crowds were probably perfectly decent people, but get a few drinks down their throats, put a few hundred of them together and you don’t have a group of individuals; you have a mob, easily led astray by the most extreme. It’s like the Nazis leading the German people in the extermination of the Jews, or in modern day terms, xenophobes calling for the expulsion of foreign people and getting more and more support for their cause every day. People predisposed to coersion are easy targets. I just wish they’d think for themselves.

On the other hand though, when I woke up safe in my own bed this morning, I heard that the famous Mathew Street Festival was still on. I was made up because I thought it’d finished the day before, so I rode off to the train station and over to Liverpool to take a few pictures, and my impression was that it was… reserved and restrained. People were standing around watching the bands, but from the look of them you couldn’t tell if they were enjoying it or not. I didn’t recognise anybody playing on any of the 6 stages dotted around the city centre and to tell the truth they all looked like middle-aged hasbeens, so I just pottered around for a while and went back home.

At one point at the stage near the Birkenhead Tunnel (the stage where the biggest crowd was drawn), I saw some older people telling off some teens just because they were jumping around to the music, telling them to stop messing before they got hurt. I got angry at them, all the kids were doing was jumping up and down having a good time, they weren’t harming anyone at all, and if a few more people had followed their example, the festival would have had a much less stifled atmosphere. Here was me, just back from a massive festival, where I was just 10 or 20 rows from the centre front for big bands like Metallica, Rage and Queens of the Stone Age, and there we were crushed, pushed from all sides and thrown around like rag dolls whilst pits opened up in the centre of the crowds. No I didn’t particularly like it, but it built the atmosphere up and I accepted that that’s what happens at big concerts when you put thousands of people in the same place, and by the end of the gig I wouldn’t have had it any other way, it was so exhilarating. I didn’t throw my scorn at it as dangerous or irresponsible. The only people I did think were being irresponsible were the physically small and weak people who went to the centre front only to be crushed and complain about it afterwards; they should have known better.

But after seeing those teens being told off, I realised that like many things, it was just my own subjective judgement. And that got me wondering whether I should be angry at the rioters at Leeds, as in that situation I was being just like the middle aged fuddy duddies. It’s all relative. I thought about this for about three nanoseconds and then stopped myself. The rioters were putting people’s lives at risk, and that cannot be dismissed as a bit of harmless fun. That isn’t a subjective value I’m placing on it, it’s pretty objective. They’re the ones who tipped the balance too far. It didn’t put me off completely because it was such a good weekend, but if one year the line-up isn’t as amazing as it was this time around, I won’t bother going, it’s not worth the hassle.

Youth and Young Manhood

“Hey, how was your summer?”

“Ooh great, I went to Barcelona and visited the cathedral and saw a bear and went to the beach and had a holiday fling and tasted all kinds of seafood and… and… and… what did you get up to?”

“Err… I spent most of my time behind a bar.”

That’s how every conversation I have for the first month or so back in Edinburgh will go. I have undoubtedly wasted my summer working slavishly every day just to scrape enough money together to pay some rent and take a bit off pressure off during the year. All summer I have been out to town twice. All summer. When I was at college, that was a weekly occurrence, at least! I have spent too little time with my friends, in fact I’ve seen my best friend twice all summer because he’s working just as much as I am. And it’s likely that I’ll have to spend every summer like this until I finish university, and then I’ll get a proper job and I won’t even have a summer! Pondering upon just how depressing this summer has been, I’ve come to wonder whether I’ve wasted my entire youth in the same way.

Have I spent too long poring over books and cramming to get good grades, and too little time messing round with my mates? Or did I get the balance about right? Looking back, I’ve in fact had a pretty damn fine childhood. I’ve taken lifechanging trips to Texas, Switzerland, Holland and Hong Kong. I’ve been white water rafting, deep sea fishing, powerboating. I’ve built my own rafts and my own shelter from nothing. I’ve been in all kinds of competitions from football to kayaking to rifle shooting to athletics, and done well in most of them. And what’s more, I’ve also been pretty successful at school as well.

So I might have worked a bit too hard this summer, but it can’t be said that I haven’t had a good childhood in general. Maybe it’s just that my youth is over and I’ve got to live in the real world now. It’s kind of a depressing thought.

A Level Results

Today is A Level results day, and again there has been an increase both in the percentage of passes and in the number of A grades. But rather than celebrating this, there are many who would rather undermine the achievements of students in such stories as I expect to see in the Daily Mail in the coming days. They like to say that the exams are getting easier and that young people these days are less intelligent than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

I get so frustrated with these cynical kinds of people. Is it not to be expected, not just celebrated, that in an advancing society people are becoming more and more skilled as time goes on? Furthermore, the longer an exam system is in use, the more accustomed teachers get to it and the better they are at teaching their students. I know my teachers’ past experience was invaluble to me in interpreting various texts and developing a good essay technique.

This is another way young people are demonized by society, just like the various news stories about ‘hoodies’ (I regularly wear a hoody and yet I’ve never beaten up an old lady. I must be a miraculous exception :/). Nevertheless what annoys me most is that if these fuddy duddies prevail and the exam system is revised completely, my achievements will be undermined and the grades on my CV will look… false, because I’ll be one of the last to go through a dying exam system.

I do, however, welcome the addition of an A* grade to the A Levels in 2010. It’s evident that top universities are finding it difficult to differentiate between the best students, and the A* will prevent particularly talented students having to worry about taking extension papers or using an alternative exam system such as the IB, both of which might not be provided at their school. Hopefully the additional grade will make it easier for people from poor backgrounds to make it into the top universities. This is an area which needs particular attention, as the differences between the south-east and the north-east demonstrates.