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Why do we have to have another riot?

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

The violent rioting that is sometimes now being called protesting - it makes the emotions so high that you almost cannot see the insults and injuries that are the people are suffering.

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.

War is what happens when language fails.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.