Re: Starved to death in an NHS Hospital

Cynic wrote:
On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:51:45 -0000, "Ret." <xxx> wrote:

What stops people doing so today is that (a) they do not feel they
have any *responsibility* to prevent anti-social behaviour in
general (that's the job of the police) and (b) they are aware that
in many cases it would be a criminal act if they were to intervene.

Or they are aware that they may end up with a knife in the ribs if
they interfere?

No, that is very seldom a consideration. If the general public felt
that they had a *responsibility* to stop antisocial behaviour, people
would club together to deal with situations that would be too
dangerous for a single person to handle.

The huge benefit of having people feeling responsible for behaviour
within their micro-society is that troublemaking gets nipped in the
bud rather than nothing being done until the situation escalates
sufficiently to involve the police (who are overstretched and thus
ineffective for all but a small percentage of cases). It also means
that children learn at an early age that bad behaviour in public is
not tolerated before their behaviour gets seriously bad.

There certainly has been a significant change in how adults react to bad behaviour by young people. Certainly when I was a young lad it was not at all uncommon for adult 'strangers' to castigate you for getting up to mischief. Nowadays it's virtually unknown.

I think the reasons for this are numerous. When I was young we had a respect for adults and would stop what we were doing and respond to the telling off. Today, if you try to tell a bunch of young kids to behave, you are very likely to receive a mouthful of foul abuse. We are back to the discipline thing again. In my day kids were scared of getting into trouble. Today the kids aren't because they know that there is very little that anyone can do to them. Their parents wont because they've been brainwashed into believing that its wrong to smack. Teachers cant because almost every method of punishment has been removed from them. We have, as a society, allowed our young people to get out of control. We have no-one to blame but ourselves.

Adults don't get involved because there is nothing they can do and they know it.

Ret.

.

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