This post was recovered, thought lost.
I was in a seminar today about county lines crime. This is a phenomena in the UK where criminal organizations recruit young people to deal and run drugs in different counties to evade the police. The lack of police centralization in the past allowed this process to flourish similarly to state line crossing crime in the US. The Met Police identified this and created a unified County Lines protocol to connect the various forces and constabularies across the country to identify criminal activity.
The speak from the St Giles charity, spoke about the reality of the hype behind the glamour of a gang. In media, rappers sing in their gilded mansions about living in the trap house and dealing cocaine with girls in bikinis. The reality of course, being dilapidated flats, bare mattresses, drug using squatters and a life of abject suffering. It amazed me to think about the heroes of our time – the icons we hold up. There is no shame in enjoying the art of artists but we take their fantasies as realities. For example, celebrities like 6ix9ine who young people idolize for reasons purely due to the glitz of it all. With lyrics like those sang about drug dealing, as the speaker said today, when you’re making 200k per performance would anyone still deal drugs with the sole purpose of making money? It just wouldn’t compare.
The County Lines strategy is a exploitation of young people thanks to the greed of others and a culture of fame and the age of celebrity. Everyone wants to be a gangster. Who doesn’t? Gangster’s or gang members have money, respect, power, sex. What do the people they exploit have in the material? They are too young or too impressionable to understand the greater truths of the Way.
“In comparative ranking of sins, applying philosophy to the common man’s distinctions, Theophrastus says that offences of lust are gravers than those of anger: because it is clearly some sort of pain and involuntary spasm which drives the angry man to abandon reason, whereas the lust-led offender has given in to pleasure ad seems somehow more abandoned and less manly in his wrongdoing.” – Meditations 2.10
Of course, by manly, we are talking about here in line with what is morally fitting within our nature as human beings.
By all accounts those targeted are victims of the pleasures of another. Rather predictably, the pleasures of wealth, power and fame feeding on the raw desperate emotions of those less financially able. It’s a story as old as time just with a new branding and a new label. Like the workhouses of the Industrial Revolution putting children to work as cheap disposable labour, so has history repeated itself at the hands of equally contemptable individuals.
What do we learn from this? The cult of celebrity and fame is a fallacy? That glamour sells tickets not realities? That pleasures feed on others to be able to be truly satiated? We can live in golden houses from our ill gotten gains for what? For the houses to be torn down and our names forgotten in three short generations with only a legacy of pain.
“In years to come if you chose this life thinking it’s all going to be alright and you’re sat in your prison cell on the phone to your mum, don’t tell her nobody told you. When people are outside your door kicking it in to steal your trainers, canteen, beat you up for a laugh. Don’t tell her nobody told you it’d be like that because this is it now. And nobody cares. You’re in prison, you’re replaceable to these people. That’s how they work.” – X
On reflection of this, reflect on the following:
“On death. Either dispersal, if we are atoms: or, if we are a unity, extinction or a change of home.
On pain. Unbearable pain carries us off: chronic pain can be borne. The mind preserves its own serenity by withdrawal, and the directing reason is not impaired by pain. It is for the parts injured by the pain to protest if they can.
On fame. Look at their minds, the nature of their thought and what they seek to avoid. And see how, just as drifting sands constantly overlay the previous sand, so in our lives what we once did is very quickly covered over by subsequent layers.” – Meditations 7.32,33,34
Under the layers of sand, in the perceptions of our pain and the dispersal of atoms, what makes the life of a gilded cage a thing to idolize more than the humble sage? What kind of icons do we produce? What kind of society do we cultivate and attitudes in the young to make them susceptible to the vices of the immoral?
Think about that with every breath and step you take, each with the common good in mind.
Z3N0
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