What annoys me about warwick

Having had the opportunity to use a blog for nearly a year and up to now avoided doing so I thought it would take something pretty inflammatory in order for me to start 'blogging'. However, sat at a desk in a soul destroying office whilst participating in my daily skive-a-thon I stumbled across this article on the Warwick boar website:

link

This sort of thing really irks me about a load of people at our university and society in general. Despite the fact that the article is attempting to be all controversial and 'zany', it also portrays a complete lack of any meaningful attempt by the author to actually engage with the people he is writing about and develop an informed opinion. Instead he opts for the stand from afar and go "har har look at the scruffy commoners" approach. Thus it's easy to claim that everyone under 18 in a fila tracksuit is the bane of society, because you give them no opportunity to fight back.
I'm no 'let's-love-everyone liberal', although I would say that my political leaning is centre-left and I do recognise the problems society has with worker absenteeism, benefit fraud, teenage pregnancy and so on. I also feel that this is often not down to people being 'products of their environments' but because, and get this, some people feel that staying at home is better than going to work, having unprotected sex is better than chastity and doing drugs is better than sobriety. But to claim that all 'chavs' are exponents of such practices is at best naive and at worst discriminatory. I know several people who I went to school with who now have kids but are also devoted parents and workers. Similarly I also have 'middle class' mates who go out every Friday, get wrecked on drugs and drink and charge around clubs looking for fights. So to put in shortly, outward appearances mean sod all.

Therefore the crux of the matter is that calling someone ignorant based on certain characteristics and then arguing that all people of a similar ilk are ignorant is pretty fucking ignorant itself. I was tempted to write a response to the article on the website, but realised that the sort of self-aggrandising nobs who write that sort of stuff can't be argued against and it would be like banging my head against the wall. Maybe a better plan of action would be to don a white Sergio Tacchini tracksuit and sovereigns and berate the c**t when he's on the bus. This won't alter his unchangeable views but it might force him to accept that whilst he sees the "track-suited boys draped over the back, spitting from the windows and throwing paper around on their way to McDonalds" as 'chavs', they probably see him as a pompous, boring, student. And it's always good to gain a second perspective about yourself.

: 26 Aug 2005 10:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem