How To Reclaim The Streets

IN THE OLD days, we all know, adults used to correct children who misbehaved. They corrected their own children and they corrected other peoples’ children. In public.

But in our day, this ancient practice has become controversial. Partly it is because all men approaching children are assumed to be sexual predators, and partly it is, as Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Spectator, that many

parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority.

The result is the response of three 10-year-olds to Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who reproved them for cycling on the sidewalk in Sudbury, England. As Boris Johnson relates, the young sprigs did not respond respectfully to Lord Phillips attempt at correction.

The 10-year-olds shrieked at the noble lord, who has been married since 1968 and who has three children. They called him a "pervert, a poofter and a paedo".

When one of these little innocents knocked Lord Phillips’ bicycle to the ground he was moved to respond.

He asked a passer-by to call the police, saying to the child: "If you think you can behave like this, you are dead wrong." To which, the boy replied, with a chilling grasp of the changed relationship between children and adults: "I am going to have you for holding me."

When the police arrived they reproved the noble lord for attempting to exercise authority in any way.

There is the problem of modern youthful misbehavior in a nutshell. If we are to reclaim the streets there cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of a young sprig that any adult has the right to correct him for misbehavior. And there cannot be the slightest doubt that ordinary citizens have the power, police or no, to arrest troublemakers.

When modern government restrains citizens from keeping the peace it is wrong, dead wrong.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Hugo on Genius

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

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