Britain Burning

London is burning. I am deeply saddened and surprised by pictures of people looting shops and burning down buildings. What do those young people think they will accomplice?

I remember the times I was in London. I spent two weeks of roaming around central London looking for Wren churches when I visited Margaret and Jack at their home in Highgate. Another time I walked from my dormitory at the University of London to the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square or passed afternoons at the British Museum sitting with the Elgin Marbles, the only air-conditioned room I found while attending a three-week class in script writing during the hottest summer the Brits ever experienced.

Now I relax in my recliner in my air-conditioned apartment. Dallas bakes under Texas’s hottest and driest summer ever. It has been hot since May, and today is the 41th straight day that the temperature has topped 100 degrees. I dream of the cool summer when John and I exchanged our house in Albuquerque for one in Ipswich, England. In June and July, I wore a sweater under my raincoat every day.

I admired my Ipswich neighbors. They were content, making do with so much less than most of us have in the U.S. They did not buy new clothes or new furniture or bigger houses. None of the women I met considered shopping as a hobby. They preferred going to theater and the Antiquarian Society, and singing in the local chorus.

Recently my friend Joyce wrote how unhappy they were with the British government’s austerity measures. My English friends are disturbed by proposed cuts in the health system. Joyce worries about losing free visits to a specialist for treatment for Parkinson’s.

After our six weeks in Ipswich, John and I spent a week in London. We did not go to the East End, where the poor people live. But to riot and burn the city? Desperate people do desperate things.

It happened here. My family left Michigan the year before the 1967 Detroit riots. Last night I talked to a friend who was there. During the riots it was too dangerous for a single woman to be alone on the streets. Her boss at the supermarket where she worked sent a car to her Detroit home to pick her up and take her home afterwards. It was a terrifying time, like a war.

I remember the horrific pictures of Los Angeles burning during the Watts riots. I also remember when my husband’s mother died. Wallace flew to Chicago; I followed in the car, driving from Texas to Illinois with the three children. I drove into Chicago at dusk. Months after Martin Luther King was killed, I was shocked, seeing empty black windows in burned out apartment buildings on Chicago’s West Side.

It could happen again.

Today the unemployment rate in poor neighborhoods is over 16 per cent. Republicans demand that all government programs and benefits must be cut. . . . like in England.