Sock Free Hideaway

BEATS OF LOVE 

127. Drifting in the Moonlight by Richenel

BLAIR'S TIMING couldn't have been worse. UK's second generation Muslim population was integrating at pace when he waged his illegal war. Both the police and media then scapegoated them whilst shielding the footy firms who caused carnage in their neighbourhoods. Inciting riots and galvanizing far-right hate groups.

The footy firm was alluring in the mid 80s for a school dropout like myself. The gang; shouting obscenities at the police in decent clobber, smelt like freedom. Luckily, after a couple of outings, one of the main heads of the FYC found his way into the family home and went on a minor wrecking spree. After picking up a broken seven inch single, I instantly fell out of love with his plotted acts of violence. Finding record shopping was a better way to spend my Saturdays. 

He goaded my pal's young brother into throwing a petrol bomb a few years later that epitomised his cowardice. Scarpering whilst my pal's young brother faced serious charges. Sadly, my pal, like many, has got more obsessed with the frightening concepts surrounding Islam and immigration than football of late. Concepts put into his head by fake online memes and coercive, radicalizing posts, but legitimized by the divisive and cowardly rhetoric of a few politicians and journalists who don't let the truth they obscure impede their inflammatory arguments. Goading arguments that have given way to a scarpering silence in the past few days. 

They mis-recognize secularization as forward thinking and modern, whilst wrongly assuming our immigrant population is backward. What's backward is evolving into nothing more than somebody who over-empathizes with problem teenagers. Responding emotively and aggressively to fucking everything. Amplified by these fully formed looking turbo-aggressive adults on our telly screens who haven't left puberty. Their kids are presumably there to get them back home. That's backward. 

It's as pathetic as it is cowardly to encourage in any way a protest borne of beak and strong lager that will inevitably turn violent, which targets entirely innocent people. A riot then, in everything but name.