A bad pacifist’s thoughts on how to respond to rioting and looting (warning: LONG)

How to respond to this? (Context: I live 5m from one of the looting zones. My local high street has been devastated.)

I’m a grandiose creature, and I want to fix the whole problem myself. I’m an impatient creature and I want it all sorted by the day after tomorrow. I’m a mathematician by training, and that means I want to reduce it to small manageable units of analysis that can then be manipulated with relative ease. Unfortunately the human condition is such that these kinds of interventions do not work. So this is my starter for ten list of what I think I’ve learned about what to do instead.

(1) Don’t give up.

This is the hardest, I think. At times like this it can be very difficult to maintain hope that (a) there can be a positive outcome, and (b) that it’s possible to make a valuable contribution. But working on maintaining hope is very important.

My ex used to say to me ‘the gates of Hell shall not prevail’ and I know that’s probably not useful for non-Christians but I’m putting it in here anyway because it has been so very, very helpful to me. I go through times when I recite it like a mantra. (I have no idea what it’s a quote from. The Internet will know.)

If you can’t find hope, put your head down and grittily keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hope will return in time.

(2) Keep practising compassion.

The police may be routinely abusing their power, may be derelict in their duty of care and may have committed crimes against vulnerable people. The police are suffering from a crisis of leadership and loss of confidence, are having their budgets slashed and are part of what appears to be a fairly toxic system in lots of ways. The second may go some way towards explaining the first but does not excuse it or remove responsibility. The first does not remove the obligation to exercise compassion and understanding of the second.

The people of Tottenham have a difficult and painful history with the police, and good reasons not to trust them. Many people in Tottenham (and other areas where rioting and looting have occurred) are currently experiencing a great deal of difficulty, poverty and despair because of economic conditions. The rioters and looters are committing serious crimes, harming innocent people and harming their communities’ prospects for regeneration. All of this can be true simultaneously.

It’s always more complicated.

People are complicated. Systems of people are even more complicated. (See many posts q.v. on the idiocy of a method of government that requires its leaders to pretend – or, worse, believe – that the system they govern is simple.)

It’s really, really easy for me to get angry. When I think about a teenage girl being battered by police (warning: violent link), I become vengeful and vindictive towards the police. When I think about local businesses that may be broken forever, I become vengeful and vindictive towards the looters. This is not going to help anyone, starting but not ending with me. If I make a conscious choice to practise compassion instead, I’m going to be a lot more useful. (See also point (5)).

(3) Keep self-care on the agenda.

Self-care is not a luxury of the bored middle-classes. It is not massage (although it may be, if you crave touch and shrivel from its lack). It is not ‘pampering’. It is doing what you need to be able to stay on our feet day after day, so that you can build your resources rather than depleting them, and so that you are in the best possible state to make smart decisions about how best to deploy those resources to get useful stuff done.

I do not wish to ignore my privilege here. Some people have more resources than others with which to care for themselves. If you have very little in the way of resource and, say, children to look after, it is vanishingly hard to care for yourself. Lack of self-care should not be another stick with which people beat themselves or others. But there is a reality that people, like plants and animals, do better when they are well maintained, and we can be more useful when we do the best we can to maintain ourselves.

(4) Look for opportunities to collaborate.

This one really deserves its own post and I’m not going to write much about it here because long post is long, and it’s also another complicated topic with many facets. (For example, I’ve written extensively here about the reasons that I’m currently not willing to be involved in organised political activity.)

But for me there is a fairly obvious principle that people can do things together that they cannot do alone, on all kinds of levels. There is a Margaret Mead quote that I’ve always loved: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I have no idea whether or not this is actually true, but it’s inspiring and I think we need all the inspiration we can get right now.

(ETA: great example here from David Yelland. Also, on Wednesday morning we are taking things (clothes, blankets, products, books etc.) to the Haringey Council for the people made homeless, so we are happy to take anything that you can get to us by then.)

(5) Pray. Yes, really.

I always feel a bit nervous about this because prayer is so linked with organised religion and I know organised religion is a really triggering topic and it’s not what this post is about. But I think praying helps even if you don’t believe in God. Obviously as per posts passim I do believe in God so I can’t make this claim from personal knowledge. But I have seen it work for enough people that I feel justified in saying that in my experience it is true. (I think a good comparison is the Buddhist practice of metta bhavana. That’s harder work, though. A prayer can be done within half a minute.)

I don’t believe that if I pray for peace there is more likely to be peace. (Well, I suppose I believe that on some weird mystical karmic level there is a connection, but I don’t think for one second there is a direct causal relationship.) But when I pray, I open myself to change. Most specifically, I let go of my anger and I’m more able to get in touch with the compassion I seek. If I pray for people – most especially the people or groups that I most despise and to whom I react with the deepest anger – then my response shifts and the anger starts giving way to understanding. This is valuable because I can then make better judgments about how to be of use. Also I have a great deal more energy when I am not spending it being cross.

(I hope it’s apparent that praying doesn’t need to be to God, or indeed to anything. Sometimes it’s useful to have a concept of a power greater than oneself, however one understands that power, but this is really not for everyone.)

(6) Keep your sights low.

I can’t fix this. I’m a private citizen. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a lot of influence. This blog is read by a hundred people max.

But I can do something. Some days, that’s nothing more than the prayer. Some days it’s showing up for a local meeting or writing a blog post or just having the guts to say ‘it’s always more complicated’ to someone who may or may not want to hear it. Et cetera.

The important thing is that I’m doing something. If I let it be enough, I can do more. If I decide that it’s inadequate, I paralyse myself and end up making no difference at all.

I will finish with the quote I cite most often in this blog, from Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not given to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” My intention in writing this is to help myself (and anyone who finds this post useful) to do the best possible imperfect job of continuing to engage with this work at a difficult time.

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