Help, it turns out, is at hand.
Lina Polonsky-Doyle (not pictured) was born and raised in Venezuela and lived in the US, as well as Italy and Slovenia. She is running a kind of boot-camp for language learners, where you’re not so much asked to leave conventional notions of language learning behind, as frisked and stripped of them as you enter the room.
“Read this!” she tells me.

I’m not given a children’s book or a grammar hand-out…but a Greek myth.
It starts off reasonably enough, with Demeter and Persefone gathering flowers in sunlit fields.
As I read the words out phonetically – thankfully most Spanish words sound as they’re spelled – Lina sits at her computer, highlighting the words and phrases I’ve stumbled on, jotting down definitions.
Shortly after, she asks me what the words mean, and then tests me again. In other words, we go straight to the vocabulary, skipping sentence structure, tenses and all the other things you feel you’re supposed to learn when tackling a foreign language.

“Think of how babies learn language!” she yells.
“By pointing at an object, ‘Oh! That is a plate!’ Or ‘…I’m hungry…!’”

If Lina’s method is unconventional, she does not subscribe to the new age philosophy that ‘there is no wrong way’ of doing things. Oh there is indeed. And should you ask how to conjugate the verb this way or that – the beloved sport of conventional language teachers – you’ll get a succinct description of just where you can file such an idea.
Why? Well, when you were a baby, you didn’t learn to speak in full sentences by knowing what a gerund is or by asking how to put your statement in the conditional. No, you simply watched and listened. You imitated those around you, forming sentences to describe needs, feelings and the world around you.

Many instructors emphasize grammar, sprinkling vocabulary along the way. But Lina says that’s backward. “Focusing on grammar is like correcting people before they’ve even started talking!”

Long before other classes have wrapped up the ER and IR verbs, Lina has us reading short stories, translating and even summarizing them in Spanish.

Hades has now spotted Persefone, and Demeter is looking for her daughter.
It doesn’t look good.

You’re not only learning new words like gather, harvest, run and return, you’re spurred on by the plot to look them up with a fervor seldom generated by such books as “Fun with Grammar.”

Here, I’m an uncharacteristically keen student, somehow reading in Spanish about an increasingly desperate Persefone. “Qué quieres de mi?” (What do you want of me?) “Ayudame!” (Help me!)

These are more than key words for captives. You’re more likely to learn the words when it helps you unlock a rapidly evolving plot. You see them in the context of a story and use them, rather than read words in disembodied lists, to be seen today and forgotten tomorrow.

Sure, you’ll encounter different tenses, singular and plural. But if you want to go beyond past present and future, and stray into more exotic territory, like asking about various conditional tenses – then you’re on your own. “You can study that at home!”

Lina hands out stories, scripts, a screenplay for a Mexican gangster film – anything containing everyday Spanish. She quotes theorists, such as Noah Chomsky – and Lev Vygotsky, who stresses gradual, repetitive learning. We need to repeat a new word 62 times, for example, before it’s truly anchored in our vocabulary.
Many courses stop short of that, which is perhaps why, when asking someone for directions or ordering food, we’re often at a loss.

“So the waitress has already come and gone…or you’ve already been put in jail – and you’re still looking for the right word!”
Jail? I suppose that’s one incentive to do your homework.

Whether your linguistic arsenal begins and ends with Hola, or you’re an advanced Spanish speaker exploring the finer points of the beautiful language, do make your way into the Lake Chapala area, and on to the cobblestone streets of Ajijic, to el Colegio de Axixic.

LINA’S DETAILS :

Lina@SpanishAjijic.com

www.SpanishAjijic.com
201 793-3528
011-52-1-(331-350-4122)

From shelters to prime Paris real estate

In the big, bright green communal kitchen, Samia Lacombe wipes the counter clean and takes some of the soup that she’s made to her new neighbors down the hall.

She passes a playroom, where half a dozen children are chasing each other – a little girl brandishes a rubber boot at a larger, and suddenly wary boy. The tables have turned.

In a sharp shift of fortune, Ms. Lacombe and her new neighbours have swapped the streets and shelters for prime office space in the heart of Paris.

*Listen to the CBC Radio Report:  Radical Solution for Paris Homeless

Lacombe and her children are among the 60 homeless people to have moved into a four-floor office building inParis’s 10th arrondissement, a district ranging from upscale strips that line the canal, to older neighborhoods that are nevertheless out of reach for a growing number of families.

Skyrocketing property prices have helped create a nation-wide homelessness crisis, with an estimated 190,000 people sleeping in the streets, alleys, and subway platforms and drifting from shelter to shelter. According to the Abbé Pierre Foundation, a group that works with the poor and homeless, an additional 400,000 people stay with friends and family on couches and floors, while more than 3 million live in crowded accommodation.

Sitting idle alongside the homeless is a staggering number of empty buildings across the country. More than 2 million properties were vacant in 2012 – reason enough to begin occupying them, say NGOs like Droit Au Logement (Right to Housing) or DAL.

In a search for available space in Paris, housing rights activists spotted a building not equipped with the sophisticated surveillance systems normally deployed on commercial property. Last month activists entered the building – how, DAL says it does not know – allowing workers to spirit Lacombe, her children, and 13 other families inside.

Not government-endorsed requisitions then, but what DAL spokesman Jean-Baptiste Eyraud calls “a citizens’ requisition” – a radical answer to the excesses of an unchecked housing market.

“Citizens Requisitions”

“Prices have doubled in 10 years, and rent has gone up by 50 percent,” says Mr. Eyraud. “The government simply doesn’t have the means to house the homeless with the existing housing stock on the market. So we have to start putting empty properties to use.”

But not every vacant building can be used in this way. Associate Professor Julien Damon at Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies) says most such properties are far from city centers, or in a state of disrepair.

Even the 100,000 or so vacant properties that he believes are potential homes, he says should be left alone, because requisitions tend to scare away investors – just when an ailing French economy needs them most.

It’s a point echoed by Paul Philippot of the National Real Estate Union. Mr. Philippot deems DAL’s occupation illegal, and says state requisition of properties – such as those carried out under former President Jacques Chirac in the 1990s – is counter-productive.  “It makes a few more properties available,” he says, “but the message being sent to property owners is, ‘if you don’t rent it out, we’ll take it from you!’ That’s a very bad signal to send.”

Not only has a message already been sent – the process has begun. The government has identified 120 vacant buildings in and around Paris, and is conducting “technical visits” to assess whether the properties are inhabitable.

Though owners will be offered compensation, it doesn’t bode well for absentee landlords who wish to wait for property values to soar even higher before they sell to the highest bidder.

‘We never feel at home’

The owners of the four-story building in the 10th arrondissement have not yet contacted DAL. Having been there a few weeks, the new occupants now have the right to remain until the courts have ordered their eviction. The legal process could take months.

But Samia Lacombe isn’t decorating the walls yet, either. She is all-too-accustomed to wandering the city in search of the next place to sleep for a family that has been “nomadic,” as she puts it, for five years. Her kids speak with business-like seriousness when assessing their new home, counting among the merits of the transformed offices the privacy and space to do their homework.

The 10-year-old bespectacled Alicia boasts with a lisp that she is at the top of her class, even though she has spent half her life living in dorms and shelters.

Her brother Henry, 17, is relieved that they can call the three-room converted apartment “home” for months, instead of weeks or days. In a nightly effort to escape the normally crowded quarters, he would do his homework on his lap in a cramped washroom. “We never feel at home,” says Henry. “We’re always uneasy. We know we can be thrown out from one day to the next.”

Their lives have been transformed more than once. Until five years ago, the family lived in a spacious flat near the canal before their luck ran out. Having separated from her husband, Lacombe could not go on paying the €3,800 ($5,100) per month rent on her salary working at a temp agency. After six months of unpaid rent, they were evicted, and have been homeless ever since.

They were whisked into their new home last month just before temperatures plunged. It’s during the cold winter months that the death toll of people living in the street begins to climb.

A deepening crisis

The situation has become so desperate, that the housing minister, Cécile Duflot, recently called on churches to open up their doors to accommodate more people.

Shelters are overwhelmed. Between 2005 and 2011, calls to the winter emergency shelter service have almost doubled. Only 12 percent of callers are directed to some kind of shelter; the rest are told to try again.

It’s likely to get worse before it gets better. France’s unemployment rate rose in December for the 20th consecutive month. More than 1 million people are in rent arrears – and the economic forecast for 2013 is grim.

While French law dictates that everyone has the right to a home, there is simply not enough social housing or shelters to keep up with soaring demand.

Ms. Duflot has committed to the construction of 500,000 accommodations in 2013 – almost double the total built last year. One third is to be social housing – an ambitious goal that even she admits will be difficult to meet.

This is what DAL and a number of groups working with the homeless have been campaigning for. Few consider requisitions a panacea – DAL works with 10,000 families to secure better housing conditions, legal advice, and long-term shelter.

But it also believes that occupying vacant properties will at least expand a limited stock of affordable housing, however modestly.

Urging the minister to press on with the requisitions she promised last month, Eyraud and his DAL colleagues recently sent her a reminder in the form of a gift.

It was a crowbar.

“A bit of humor,” he says with a smile.

Thanks to the NRA and their Republican sycophants America is awash with weapons – but the reason why the US has the most homicides in the industrialised world is not due to guns alone.

Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., gun-rights activists have called for firearms in schools. Advocates of gun control, on the other hand, have urged a ban on assault weapons – even though the majority of murders are committed with handguns.

None of this addresses the daily death toll wrought by violent crime in American cities. The sheer number of guns would seem to provide part of the explanation.

Between 12,000 and 16,000 people are killed every year, roughly three-quarters by firearms. Among major Western countries, the United States has by far the highest number of homicides, as well as the highest number of guns: some 300 million, enough for every adult in the country.

That might seem to provide the answer. But it would not explain why the gun-possessing Swiss, for example, have such low homicide rates.

A crucial, underlying cause of violent crime is inequality. Numerous studies have shown a strong correlation between inequality and violence. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone , Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett say no aspect of inequality is clearer than the impact it has on violence.

The most violent states are the most unequal

In graphs that map income inequality alongside murder rates, the US stands far off in a class of its own, with both the highest levels of inequality and of homicides of any wealthy nation.

At state level, California, Mississipi, Alabama, Illinois and Louisiana have some of the highest murder rates in the United States, and they are also all among the country’s ten most unequal states.

Even accounting for poverty, studies have found that the greater the disparity among household incomes, the higher the homicide rate is.

Chicago reached a grisly milestone last week when its 500 th murder victim died, bringing the city’s yearly total towards the number of homicides for all of Canada.

Loyola University of Chicago psychologist Albert Lurigio told a city newspaper that Chicago’s rising murder rate is a symptom of a “community in distress.”

Make no mistake: Affluent areas like Lakeview and Lincoln Park saw no such carnage; they seldom lose more than one or two people a year to violence.

Chicago’s Austin area  accounts for a significant number of the city’s homicides. The rates of violent crime are a mirror in any community, and for American neighbourhoods like Austin, the reflection is not good. It suffers from skyrocketing unemployment and reportedly the highest number of foreclosures in the city.

A mounting body of evidence suggests that income inequality erodes social cohesion and trust, and contributes to a breakdown in the fabric of the community. Extreme inequality has been identified as causing humility and loss of face, particularly among young males. These in turn can contribute to ‘competitive aggression,’ domestic abuse and violent crime.

If current trends are any indication, worse may yet be to come. Inequality levels continue to soar, federal and state aid is being squeezed, and hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans are being cut off the federal government’s extended unemployment-benefits program.

Even worse before it gets better?

President Barack Obama’s belated effort to raise taxes on the wealthy has become a desperate battle against entrenched Republican opposition. If Washington is forced to enact the “fiscal cliff” austerity legislation, federal unemployment benefits will likely be cut for some two million people.

It would mean the end of improvements in tax credits for low-income families–precisely the kinds of policies that should be built upon to reduce the chasm of inequality that has been widening since 1980.

Instead, a record number of Americans – more than 45 million – are on food stamps, and stagnant wage levels have helped swell the ranks of the working poor.

Those at the bottom are more often the perpetrators – and victims – of gun violence. But just as conservative politicians are untouched by cuts to social assistance, they are unaffected by most of the gun crime that has turned the United States into a kind of war zone for the poor.

So it may explain why some legislators have not approached either gun control or the budget talks with the sense of urgency required to save lives.

(Published in The Globe and Mail.)

In the uprising against French rule that began in 1954, some 150,000 Algerians and 18,000  French troops died.

But one thing kept the Algerian nationalists going.

They  received funding  from families and social networks abroad – particularly in Paris.

In a special report for France 24, I met Algerians who were caught up in it then, and who have been seeking some sort of peace ever since – not least within themselves.

THE UNDECLARED WAR IN FRANCE

Sprawling throughout Paris in the 1950s were strong support networks for Algeria’s uprising against the French.  Authorities kept a close eye on Algerian men, and it often fell to women and children to deliver documents and collect money for the National Liberation Front or FLN.

Ahmed Boudjellal was nine years old when members asked his parents to have him start making deliveries.

“We would leave it in the letter box, we would wait in this or that alley or street, he passed, saying ‘you have something for me?’ And he took it. Then he would turn down a side street, and that was it.”

As a boy, Boudjellal wasn’t told what he was carrying. They were likely pro-FLN leaflets, personal messages and plans for secret meetings.

VIOLNCE INTENSIFIES

Apart from the constant, clandestine activity, clashes began to erupt as the war in Algeria dragged on.  Tit-for-tat violence between the Paris police and FLN reached a crescendo in 1961, when some two dozen officers were killed.

In October Said Abtout was among the thousands of FLN members and sympathisers taking part in a peaceful march in central Paris. They protested against a curfew that prevented Algerian activists from meeting after dark.

French police cracked down on the demonstrators with merciless brutality.

“Over there where there’s a bike lane now, that’s where they beat us with their truncheons,” recalls Abtout. “When I saw the number of officers begin to surround us, I ran away. I saw people on the ground, being beaten with batons and being kicked in the head. It was horrible to see.”

Estimates of the number of demonstrators beaten to death by police that day range from 30, to more than fives as many. The event crowned a particularly bloody month in the capital, during which a number of police officers were shot dead.  Activists were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the river Seine to drown.

But the death toll in the capital paled in comparison with the number of Algerian nationalists who died on their own soil – 150,000 – were killed by the French and in factional fighting.  About 18,000 French soldiers and conscripts died.

THE FATEFUL DAY

Even as the violence intensified, peace negotiations between France and Algeria’s provisional government were under way, finally leading to the cease fire on March 19, 1962.

The same day, Georges Morin – whose youth was overshadowed by war – celebrated his 20th birthday.  News of the accord was a gift, of a sort.

“Peace – at last! We didn’t know what was going to happen but at least the massacres would come to an end. Thank God, it’s stopping. But then came the fear.”

LEFT BEHIND IN A LIBERATED COLONY

Fear that is, of the reprisals and the violence that would follow. Born in Algeria of French parents, Morin was torn. He was among the million or so Europeans – known as Pieds Noirs, (literally, ‘black feet’) who lived in Algeria for generations. The war had officially ended, but random attacks on the Pieds Noirs continued.

Thousands of men, women and children were returning to France every week.

“To see eight friends out of 10 just leave was traumatic. I took them to my airport,” says Morin.

“It was a real rupture of two worlds. Until then, France and Algeria were one country for me. My country. Not only did it break my heart, it was a dream that was being torn apart.”

And it marked the end of 132 years of French colonial rule in Algeria, now being highlighted at the Military Museum in Paris.

FIFTY YEARS LATER: STILL HEALING

Georges Morin and Said Abtout stroll through the exhibition, passing photos and war-time paintings, to gaze at French troops training in a propaganda film of the time.

“Since 1962, I’ve spent time trying to sew this fabric back together,” says Morin. “I did it by teaching in Algeria, by working on partnerships between towns in France and in Algeria, by volunteering my time.”

For his part, Abtout has found in Communism a way of transcending the ethnic and political divisions that continue to linger in an independent Algeria. “Being a Communist is above all an opportunity, because for us, it’s not about this one is European, this one belongs to that group,” he says.

“When you’re a Communist, we are one. We work for everyone’s well-being.”

The new Algeria is perhaps not what either man had dreamed of. In the tumultuous half century since independence, Abtout and Morin have visited family there, and done what they can to help a country that is still healing, fifty years on.

A man is swinging an object that looks like a long stick or a branch at people on the side-walk.

It’s a knife with a foot long blade. He’s cut at least a couple of people already and continues to walk and slash, as if possessed.

I ride ahead, jump out in front, and throw the Velib at him. The bloody thing is so heavy it falls short of the maniac, who turns and runs.

Five or six young men – friends of a man he had stabbed – fly past. By the time I catch up to them, he’s pasted on the ground, getting the last blows of what seemed a proper pummelling.

But he’s still refusing to let go of the knife. I take it upon myself to bend down to yell in his ear in rather coarse French that he shan’t ever awake unless he releases the blade.

“Lache ton putain arme ou je te tue!” So he does, not knowing it’s the voice of the man who tried to wound him with a Velib.

He receives a few kicks, punches and other after-thoughts from men who could have been far less hospitable to our deranged fellow traveller. When the cops arrive they fail to convey their gratitude to the young vigilantes, and tell them to remain where they are. Les mecs du quartier think they’re being held as suspects, and they’re furious. A new chapter is about to open.

I approach the cops: “Not to tell you how to do your job, but you might want to let them know they’re witnesses.”

I don’t wait for the slow-moving officers to wrap it all up, and it’s hard to say how it might end. The young men were either detained and interrogated or questioned and released, depending on which cop got to them, and how successful the youngsters were in keeping their cool.

As I ride away, cops are blocking off roads and stopping groups of young men – even though it was a group of young men who rounded up the drunken swordsman.

Given the stakes that the wayward fellow was playing for, I found it all remarkably contained when he was apprehended. One man wanting to give him a prolonged kicking was steered away by his more business-like colleagues.  He shows us why he’s so angry, lifting up his jacket to reveal a blood-stained t-shirt covering a wound that is still open and untreated.

Another passer-by reveals a bloody hand, and asks, abashedly, if anyone has something to stem the bleeding.

I offer to bind it with my scarf, but he shakes his head: “No, thanks,” he says. “Don’t worry….T’en fais pas.”

So I shout out for tissues among the crowd that had suddenly formed in the aftermath.

This young man wouldn’t hear of me sullying my clothes for a mere flesh wound.
It is Paris, after all.

When President Barack Obama read scriptures and saluted the armed forces on Sunday, little was said of the injustice the U.S. government continues to commit against its own people.

On September 11, 2001, fire-fighters, police, emergency services and regular civilians waded into the poisonous wreckage of the twin towers in search of survivors and human remains.

Perhaps they had no idea.

Or they put out of mind, the maw of toxicity in which they were working:  90,000 litres of jet fuel from the fallen planes, hundreds of tonnes of asbestos, pulverised lead, mercury and other highly toxic chemicals.

These men and women went in wearing no more than a bandanna over their mouths or what the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart described as the kind of mask “a Japanese businessman would wear when he has a cold.”

Some responders were given protection, many were not.

Recently released documents show that on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed, federal officials in Washington and New York downplayed concerns about health risks, concealing information that might have helped people who were contaminated by the chemicals at Ground Zero.

Signs warning people not to come to work were re-written to give them the impression it was safe to do so. Officials declared certain areas safe before testing had begun.

Many volunteered or were asked to work in and around “The Pile.”
That is, the pile of toxic debris, in which they developed respiratory problems and what became known as World Trade Centre Cough. For many, these were the beginnings of malignant cancers that have so far taken hundreds of lives.

A long-delayed government bill to provide $7.4 billion in free health care and compensation payments was blocked by Republicans.  It has since been revised and passed, with the following catch: people could apply for some treatments under the act, such as for post-traumatic stress disorder. But not cancer:  it has been excluded from federal health funding. Officials argue there’s insufficient evidence to prove any direct link between responders’ exposure to the carcinogens at Ground Zero, and the disease.

But a link has become quite clear indeed.
Dr. David Prezant, chief medical officer at New York City Fire Department, has authored several studies on the health effects of exposure to World Trade Centre dust, including one just published in the Lancet Medical Journal.

It found that fire-fighters who were involved in the days and weeks that followed the trade centre attacks had a 19% higher risk of contracting cancer than people who were not exposed.

Responders continue to suffer from a number of illnesses, and struggle to get decent medical care.

If the government has done little for them, they have done even less for the other ‘heroes’ that were packed off to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Returning war veterans are far more likely than the rest of the population to be unemployed and to suffer from mental illness. Staggering numbers live on the streets and in shelters.  One study found that more than 130,000 veterans spent at least one night in a homeless shelter in 2009 — a count that did not include those living on the streets. The numbers are expected to go up as more veterans return home.

If this is how the US treats its heroes, it’s little wonder the world’s robo-cop is unperturbed by the “collateral damage” it wreaks abroad.

So many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion in 2003 that communities must sometimes dig mass graves, without so much as a proper funeral – let alone a yearly national ceremony.  It wouldn’t make sense anyway –  Iraqis wouldn’t know which date to commemorate.

US officials have a precise record of American casualties, but keep no such tally for the Iraqi dead. It’s unclear whether this is because policy-makers knew the numbers would be so high that they would undermine popular support for the occupation, or if it’s out of an unspoken belief that Iraqi lives are simply worth less than the flag-draped US servicemen and women. NGOs and think-tanks have nevertheless kept track of the Iraqi dead and numbers range from 100,000 and up.

Add to this the unseen foreigners in faraway lands snatched by secret services, detained for months – and indeed years. Many have been tortured in jails all over the world in America’s outsourced system of summary justice – and never brought to trial. Most Guantanamo detainees have been sent quietly back to their home countries, neither charged nor compensated for the permanent physical and psychological damage done to them and their families.

What underlines it all is a deep disdain for human rights and a profound lack of empathy.
This isn’t new: both pre-date the attack on the US, and could be counted among its fundamental causes.

Writer Martin Amis tried to put his finger on it just days after the planes plunged into the twin towers:  “Various national characteristics – self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity – have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away.”

This only begins to describe some of Washington’s players, the narrow interest groups that corrupt them, and the contempt they hold for those outside of their inner circle.

How else to explain the highest levels of inequality in the western world, Washington’s willingness to take the country to the brink of bankruptcy, or its tax cuts for the wealthy in the face of slashed social programs for the poor?

The anniversary’s solemn talk of unity, heroes and other tropes of a healthy, unified and mythical nation, perpetuates the gullible stupor of credulous Americans, and insults the intelligence of those who know better.

The US is all but paralyzed by a cruel and vicious parasite intent on bleeding the body politic white.

The only thing standing in the way of further decline are the men, women and children who refuse to take part in this poisonous political pantomime.

A group of veteran police officers, fire fighters, construction workers and surviving families of those killed in September, used their experience to create H.E.A.R.T. 9/11 to respond to disasters elsewhere in the world.

Private donors give hundreds of millions of dollars to veterans and their families to make up for chronic shortfalls in government funding.

A former US Environmental Protection Agency scientist has launched a petition calling for stronger federal rules on the materials used in buildings – to avoid the kind of chemical fallout that continues to sicken and kill 9-11 responders.

Far from the speeches and public displays of hollow patriotism, these people and countless others are trying to save and transform people’s lives.

Turn off the TV and leave the political theatre to the transparent actors and rotting stage they play on.

Support the people making a real difference.

Join them.

But you would be wrong.

While those best acquainted with the culprits – youth workers and members of the community – were careful not to draw any conclusions in the first days of rioting, the Prime Minister knew within hours of his return from a Tuscan holiday, just what kind of problem he was facing.

The first hint that his promise of “swift justice” might be amiss, was that various parts of the capital had already been burning for two nights.

More worryingly, the PM hasn’t seemed terribly keen to find out why people took a sudden interest in making Molotov cocktails and setting things on fire.

He said the behaviour of these young miscreants was simply “sickening” – a fair enough start if you wish to proceed to a more reasoned diagnosis.

But he didn’t.

It was the beginning and end of the kind of sanctimonious proclamation to which we are becoming accustomed on both sides of the Atlantic. In North America the hollow ring of right-wing carnival barkers dismissing all and sundry as “liberal”, “evil” or “socialist” is all too familiar.

But until recently, British public debate seemed somewhat more sophisticated – parliament notwithstanding.

Mere hours after Cameron’s return, the government authorised the use of water cannons – all but useless in the face of fast-moving rioters – as well as plastic bullets, which have never been used in England, for good reason.

Luckily the bobbies finally did what they (usually) do well: they gained control of looters using minimal force and made arrests up and down the country – more than 2,000 in just over a week.

But judges then set to work with frightful fervour. In courts that operated round the clock, they issued sentences that were vastly out of step with the crimes committed.

Two young men had posted messages on facebook inviting people to join them for a riot in the (under-performing) north of England. The only people to come were the police, who promptly arrested them.  In short order, the lads were given four years for organising a riot that never happened.

A college student who wandered into a looted supermarket to steal a case of bottled water was given six months in prison.

A mother of two was given a five month sentence after receiving a pair of shorts that had been stolen during the riots. She has since launched the first successful appeal. The judge set aside Ursula Nevin’s prison term and assigned her community service work instead.

There are likely to be many more such appeals, clogging up the already congested courts.

The bewigged brethren got so carried away giving hard time to facebook crooks that they’ve pushed the prison population even closer to capacity.

Some 86,000 places are filled, with only 1,000 or so places to spare. Anyone unlucky enough to get rough justice now could be looking at time in the Tower.

No country in Western Europe imprisons more of its population than England and Wales.

But wait – there’s more.

Competing with looters, traffickers of contraband shorts, and the vigilantes and reactionary judges who chase them, is the armchair policy-maker, who knows just how to sort it all out.

More than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for rioters to lose their social assistance.

So let’s get this straight.

Angry, unpredictable youths living in areas with high unemployment have calmed down for long enough to be told they’ll be stripped of what little money they get.

Now, added to the toxic mix that created widespread, deadly rioting in the first place, is the prospect of even deeper poverty.

Let’s see how that goes.

Even as windows shattered and buildings blazed, looters formed an orderly British queue to steal from JD Sports – stopping to try on shoes before leaving.

The London mayor, the floppy and oft-befuddled Boris Johnson was chided for taking his time to return from holiday to a crisis-ridden capital.

After two nights of violence, Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin warned the wayward youths to just “stop it now.” He sounded like an exhausted uncle who had for some reason been entrusted with a pack of vaguely related upstarts who refused to go to bed.

He struck as farcical a figure as that cast by Prime Minister David Cameron who said the yobs were already captured in photos, on video and would be tracked down.

Overnight courts were set up to process hundreds of cases. Hooded youngsters emerged from the courthouse to finger-wagging as can only be done by the indignant Englishman – and woman.  Yelling “shame!” outside of a courthouse in north London, one woman told journos they should be given hard time. “They should have a good think about what they’ve done.”

Bless her. No sooner had the judicial wheels begun spitting out fresh young convicts, than word got out of the mild sentences they were getting: community service orders or discharged entirely.

That changed, but England’s police, judiciary and above all, politicians were caught unaware. The riots have highlighted the blessed oblivion in which the English elite slumber, and the vast distance between Westminster, and the faraway impoverished areas it tries to govern.

In North America many of us have a tin ear for accents. But any Brit can hear in an instant the stark difference between Westminsterish and the variety of patois spoken on council estates.

While the politicians in the Square Mile are fond of abstractions like the Big Society, fairness and opportunity, England’s poor tend to use concrete terms, like ‘cheque,’ ‘bread’ and ‘milk.’

So when the two worlds caught a glimpse of each other last week, there emerged a combination of bewilderment, confusion and mutual contempt.

The country’s leaders have so far vowed to restore ‘law and order’ and bring the miscreants to justice.  Cameron said gangs were ‘at the heart’ of the violence. But young and not-so-young, men and women, white as well as black all took part in the disorder.

And when an entire cross-section of society decides to trash their own communities, something deeper and more complicated is at work.

It may be too early to blame the riots on the latest cuts to social services, but it’s not a moment too soon to cite the degradation of Britain’s impoverished inner-city areas as being at least one contributing factor.

The gap between rich and poor has continued to widen, and those who boast of how rich and poor live cheek by jowl may now see that the juxtaposition of wealth and want can add insult to injury.  Jobless young people with no stake in society have nothing to lose. Fed a constant media diet of corporate-sponsored bling that accentuates demand and desire, it’s little wonder that they’ll get out of hand when there’s nothing much to do. Their behaviour may be inexcusable, but it needs to be examined.

In households lacking educational or parental structure and worse – where drugs, alcohol, and abuse is rife – it’s perhaps a wonder the Realm is so seldom in turmoil.

But along with the doddering uncle, the finger-wagging aunty and the alarmingly violent upstart children, there is in England an inspiring tradition of analysis, debate and self-criticism.

Early attempts to dismiss the riots as simple thuggery are finally being supplanted by more nuanced analysis, which helps us begin to understand the causes and consequences of the latest eruption of social alienation, and may give an indication of where we go from here.

“They play and eat without washing their hands, so it’s not healthy,” says local health care worker, Nontuthuzelo Debesse, who is paying home visits. “That’s why there’s a lot of diarrhoea, because there’s a lot of dirty water running in the streets.”

Debesse is one of some 30 women working for about $100 a month to give basic care and advice to families, to prevent illnesses from becoming deadly.

They check to see whether children are immunized, provide medication, and arrange for visits to health clinics and hospitals.

Debesse enters a small shack to see Nortyie Magada, whose 4 year-old daughter has been suffering from diarrhoea, which can be fatal for children when untreated.

Unemployed and unable to afford transportation to hospitals, Magada and her husband have come to count on the visits.

“Every day they’re coming, and look for her. They take her to the hospital, and then every time they wash her and put cream on her.”

When children show signs of being unwell, Debesse says most parents don’t know what to do.

“But we as carers we see the symptoms that maybe the child has Tuberculosis or is HIV positive. And we help them take the kids to the clinic, and then we visit every time to see if there is progress.”

In a small office in Du Noon, the carers crowd around Dr. Elbeth Hoffman, who during weekly workshops, trains them to become more effective as an early warning system for families requiring treatment and care.

The women “were not always aware of what it takes to provide children with medication,” says Hoffman. “So now I provide that information, so when they do visit the home, they might be aware of those things and support the parents better.”

Dr. Hoffman’s workshops are supported by the non-governmental organization Kidz positive, (funded in part by USAID). The women work for South African NGO St. John Ambulance. Partnerships of this kind are rare in South Africa, and amount to a drop in the ocean of need for better care.

Since the UN Millennium Development Goals were announced in 2000, some of the world’s poorest countries have managed to reduce child deaths. Not so in South Africa, where mortality rates are back where they were in 1990. For every pool of 1,000 children in the population, 62 children die before their fifth birthday. That number has failed to fall because of malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, and HIV–AIDS. (The average for Sub-Saharan Africa is 144, compared to just 4 or 5 in Europe.)

South Africa’s health care system was in the spotlight last year when six newborn babies were found dead in a Johannesburg hospital in one day. A health department investigation revealed the hospital was unhygienic, ill-equipped and understaffed.

Poor children fare the worst.

They often live far from a hospital or health clinic, and are unable to afford the transportation costs to travel to one.

To buttress a beleaguered national health service, more local health clinics are being built – including one expected in Du Noon by 2014. In the mean time, specialists say grass-roots care must be scaled up.

“That means community health workers in much larger numbers than there are now, and equipped with a broader set of skills,” says David Sanders, a paediatrician and Professor of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape.

Continuing her home visits, Nontuthuzelo Debesse pops in to see Pamella Detsele, who has been living with HIV/AIDS for eight years. Until Debesse and her colleagues began their visits last year, Detsele often forgot to take her medication. Now she receives a daily reminder by text message at 7am and 7pm.

Her health has improved dramatically: her CD4 count – a type of blood cell indicating the strength of the body’s immune system – has risen from 74 to 900.

Detsele’s husband died from AIDS eight years ago. A decade before that, her eight month-old son was suffering from frequent bouts of diarrhoea. During a severe episode one evening they rushed to hospital, but it was too late. Detsele says spotting the symptoms earlier may have saved the baby’s life.

“Maybe he could survive if it was this time now,” she says, pointing to the care workers making lunch in her kitchen.

While this kind of care is rare in South Africa, it’s bearing fruit in South Asia.

Recent studies in India have shown that women’s groups providing home-care support and health education have helped bring about significant reductions in infant mortality, cutting it by a third in the first year of the survey. That figure rises to 45% in years two and three.

With improved access to healthcare, the prognosis for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals might not be so bleak. Of the 68 countries aiming to achieve MDG 4 – reducing mortality rates in children under five between 1990 and 2015 – only 19 are on track.

But 17 countries have cut mortality rates by more than half.

It may well take years before it flourishes in the rocky soils of Tunisia and Egypt, but it makes for more interesting viewing than the bizarre showcase of constitutional texts on American television.

Fox and NFL put on a pastiche of propaganda for the Super Bowl last week, with scenes of flowing flags and heroic statues of the founding fathers, surely causing violent nausea here, north of the border, and beyond.

The smooth, hovering cameras cruised over patriotic figures like dogma-laden drones, when General Colin Powell and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell began their eulogy to the United States of America.

And what an ode!

“It was in Philadelphia in 1776 when our founding fathers declared independence,” beamed the former Secretary of State.

Authorities in China, North Korea and Iran must have looked on in envy at the thought of this massive, captive audience. Millions of Americans sat wide-eyed in front of their screens, force-fed a TV dinner of indoctrination.

Now Goodell is looking earnestly into the camera. “Freedom is common sense,” he tells us with a straight face. “It is our constant, steadfast message to the world…In America, our home, we are free, equal.”

No, America, you’re not.
If we’re to wake, just for a moment, from this drug-induced day-dream to glance at the facts, you must surely know that you are the most unequal industrialized society in the world, next to Singapore.

The hymn to ‘freedom’ is every bit as hollow. The US imprisons more than 2 million people – more than any other nation on earth – including China.

The suits, soldiers, athletes and children now forced to stare into the camera while reciting this weird, archaic script, reminded me first of Soviet Russia.

Football-shaped Psychosis

But then it called to mind a psychology text book, where two overlapping circles depict one’s mental health.  One circle represents how you see yourself, the other is how the world sees you. The more they overlap – the bigger the football-shaped area in the middle – the closer your sense of self is aligned with the personality you present to the world.

The further they are apart, the more skewed your sense of self is, and the more likely that is to cause problems to the people around you. If the American psyche could be mapped in this way, we would find the spheres so far apart as to constitute a blueprint for collective psychosis.

In few other countries can one imagine being force-fed a series of monologues proclaiming the nation’s greatness over warbling trombones and trumpets, as though cobbled together by a Hollywood intern and a retired Soviet apparatchik.

Everything is fine – They told us so

But there’s more to it than hypocrisy or unfulfilled ambition. As long as you’re convinced you live in the “land of the free”, you’re not going to rally in the streets to demand real change, are you? You don’t see the need for it.  For decades, Mubarak received American-made weaponry, but he should have asked for tutorials with US indoctrinators as part of the deal.

Standing in front of fluttering flags doesn’t make America free or democratic. It’s by building and using the institutions that once aimed to protect you from tyranny. It’s by trying suspects in courts of law rather than letting them languish in prison – uncharged – for years.  In short, it’s by doing the things that most civilized countries do – without making a song and dance about it.