Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent piece on the decline of the British character.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0294.htm
I took my husband, mother and two daughters back to the ancestral homeland last summer. We had a lovely time overall, but the changes were alarming. We spent a week in York and a week in the Yorkshire Dales. York is lovely, but the demeanor and behavior of "young" people there was very alarming to the kids. My 10 year old would stare out her window in the wee hours, awakened by rowdy, screaming drunks. She was truly frightened, and I couldn't blame her. I was rather worried myself. Even in broad daylight, we had to witness some pretty freakish activity and garb.
We all had a much nicer time in the Dales, but we all felt far less safe in England than in the U.S. The feeling of the place, in a word: menacing.
(And don't get me started about the Friday afternoon when we took a wrong turn near Burnley, Lancashire and were driving down the street just as hordes of men were pouring out of the local mosque...)
Here's an excerpt:
"Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.
I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm. The same belief seems universal among those who spend hours at soccer games screaming abuse and making threatening gestures (whose meaning many would put into practice, were those events not policed in military fashion). "
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