Disorder and the Public

The occasions on which more than 200 people fit into Swanvale Halt church are not usually liturgical ones. With the exception of the Crib Service and the Infants School Christmas Production (liturgical only in the very broadest sense of the word) they tend to be concerts; or, as it turned out on Friday night, a public meeting about antisocial behaviour in the area. The Mayor of Hornington, one of our congregation, having called the meeting, sat up front with a variety of councillors, officials, and police, laying out the context, receiving comments from the floor, and answering questions. 

A lot of people were very hurt, angry and upset, but thankfully the keyboard warriors who demand that various teenagers be strung up from lampposts around the village did not make their presence felt. Instead while there was clear and unmistakable frustration at the sense that an entire community is being held to ransom by what amounts to about ten naughty teenagers about whom nobody seems able to do anything, there was much sympathy for the anguished parents of some of those young people and a recognition that action has to be slow and multifaceted, rather than there being a single, clear course to take. Quite a lot of people volunteered to assist the local church-supported youth work charity and some of the outreach schemes the police are thinking about, and the Borough Commander appealed for residents to communicate the information they had rather than just keep it to themselves and fume. After all, not reporting on the grounds that 'the police won't do anything' is a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. 

This is not the first episode of disruption I've seen in ten years here, nor the first one I've told you about on this blog. I'm convinced much of it is cyclical and dies away come the dark nights and cold weather; not that we should be complacent, as although vandalism and abusive talk are low-level evil, evil is what they are and they can be the seeds of worse things. I do question my own resolution at dealing with it. I think I suffer from exactly the same sort of moral uncertainty and paralysis as everyone else, even when we tell ourselves we don't. 

I cycled down the hill the following evening at 11 to see whether there was anything going on. There was no one about at all, and the worst evidence of disruption I found in the churchyard was a crisp packet. Defending community values could be deferred to another night.