blame...

It's much easier being a director at this stage. Actually I think it's much easier being a director in general. All those words. They sound rubbish when you write them down. Well when I write them down anyway. But at the risk of sounding like a backseat driver, maybe it's precisely this difficulty we're all experiencing that we need to focus on. i.e. our difficulties assimilating with other people, and most importantly, with crime in our community. I like Joel's point about needing to take communal responsibility for problems in our social climate, (although really, he's got to get his first draft in tonight, so i don't know how he's got time for blogging...), in the sense that cultures of violence are engendered through social/political endorsement of that act in every corner of our lives. Much like we can't really be surprised when nine-year-old girls turn anorexic or credit card debts have doubled since last year. Our entire culture perpetuates these problems as plainly as noses on faces. And that attitude seems like a step in the right direction towards a greater collective responsibility for the problems in this country. But will it actually change anything? To attribute these problems to mere shifts and movements in government action or social trends seems to dismiss them as something which is beyond our control to fully understand and therefore deal with. Also, as John points out, it opens a whole can of worms about blame... Wouldn't it be better to channel our energies into accepting that we don't understand these things, but that we could, if we asked more questions, and more focussed, specific ones at that.