By Dwight Swanson

Our church is in a part of town instantly recognised by people who know Manchester in terms like ‘deprived’, or ‘drugs and gangs’, or ‘bad’. The mental image will be of feral ‘yoof’.

Young people here are not your typical middle-class sort of adolescents.

Chances are their parents found themselves unemployed and unemployable during the Recession of the 1980s, when unemployment here reached 50% at one point, and didn’t fall below 25% for a decade. Chances are they have never seen their parents work.

Chances are the idea of having a job is not part of their mental framework, or ‘world view’, if you will. One of the lads at the church’s Youth Club mentioned once that he aspired to working a particular job, and was laughed down by his mates.

Over the past 25 years we have offered a ‘Youth Club’ at the church off and on. Sometimes more off than on. Most of the time the youth workers have been typical young people enthusiastic to do something for God, but from very different backgrounds than those of the youth who would come into the building. In recent years the leadership is properly qualified in youth work, and able to lead the volunteers wisely. But, the youth are still much the same.

When the youth club is ‘off’, it tends to be because much of the membership is in jail. The club takes a break, then starts again later, sometimes with a new generation.

In earlier times we attempted to make place for them in our church services. If the lights were on in our building in the evening (we use the same space for both worship and weekly activities), the lads would flock to them like moths. They were hilariously disruptive; once they placed pictures of nude women in all the Bibles. Eventually we had to exclude them from services, and placed bouncers at the door (it was helpful to have some large college students in the church). One had his jacket sliced with a knife. While wearing the jacket.

These stories may tend to reinforce the stereotype of the community, but are not intended to. They express reality. But they are not the whole story.

Our pastor related the story today of a conversation with a couple of the lads this week. They sat still for a while, and became reflective, in a young person sort of way. And expressed what they hoped for their own futures. She noticed new tattoos peaking out from the sleeves of their T-shirts, and asked to see them. They were awkward about revealing them. They turned out to be henna tattoos; but they were the sign of the dominant local gang.

Young boys with the desire for a future life like other boys; yet, if those tattoos become permanent, heading for a too familiar future. Which future it will be is not set. But the ‘cards’ are stacked heavily against the hopeful outcome.


This is but one facet of life in this part of the city. More work with young people takes place outside of church buildings. The term used these days is ‘Detached Work’. Instead of creating a programme and trying to get young people to come, the youth workers go where the young people are. On their ground and on their terms. It seldom registers on the sort of records either churches or governments keep. But from time to time it reveals another facet of life, as this past week, with photos. People like Gideon have been quietly spending time with young people, below the public radar, for years. They simply get alongside, and offer space and opportunity for hope to take expression. Read about it here (link).

Another facet is caught by the light. Just one of many.

By Dwight Swanson

While the American public is distracted by fears that the President was going to try to indoctrinate their children into Socialism, just like Hitler did with his Hitler Youth (with no apparent sense of irony in pairing these contradictory ideologies in one sentence) with one speech, no one seems to have noticed the publication of figures for the trade in weapons of mass destruction for 2008. The sums are breathtaking (link):

‘The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before…Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons sales in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year’

Note the date—2008, last year of the presidency of George W Bush. Republicans are good for big business. And, it seems, the business of war is booming. Bush’s tax cuts for big business really worked.

Does anyone wonder where the guns come from that keep the world’s poorest people in perpetual agony? The figures above make very clear where 68.4% of them come from.

So, America, let me get this straight: one president takes the country into two wars at the cost of trillions of dollars, and places American business at the centre of provision of arms for wars all over the world, and is good because that is capitalism; another president seeks to provide health care for the children of his own country, and is bad because that is socialism.

By Dwight Swanson

News from Somalia, confirmed by US officialslink, reports the death of a leading Al Qaida figure by missiles fired from an American helicopter. The embattled government of Somalia is delighted. The insurgent group, unsurprisingly, vows revenge on America.

The cycle of violence continues:

Firstly (as far as we can say at this moment), certain Islamist groups, particularly Bin Laden’s al Qaida, take issue with the West, particularly the US, and the result is 9/11.

In response, the West, particularly the US, respond with decisive action in Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban and sending Bin Laden running for the hills.

In response, Saleh Ali Nabhan carries out the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as a hotel in Mombasa.

In response, the US tracks Saleh down in the wastes of Somalia, and take him as he drives along in a car. They take his body with them.

In response, al-Shabab (Nabhan’s group) vow revenge.

And, in response…?

The endless cycle escalates, drawing more and more actors into the violence. Civilised Moderns find the biblical ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to be a barbaric relic of a primitive past. But it was, and is, a restraining influence on an unlimited cycle of revenge. Who will hear?

What has been accomplished in these eight years? How many dead? How much closer to peace? How much more do the combatants understand each other now, beyond the refining of the techniques of killing?

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Editor suggested that a response to the atrocity might be to engage with poor Muslim countries to address their poverty rather than to bomb them (see The Daily Gazelle archives for September 2006). It was considered then, and no doubt will continue to be so considered, ‘airy-fairy’ thinking.

But, has the policy of bombs solved the problem? The present US administration may have dropped the name ‘War on Terror’, but the policy has not changed.

The cycle continues.