Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.” Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can't have it the second they want it. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Wild got into the air like a virus, and it's spreading. Sometime since then, we started turning feral. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero. There was plenty of bad there, I don't forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn't break the rules lightly. We went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, and it would never even have crossed a kid's mind to tell an adult to fuck off. “I remember this country back when I was growing up.
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