The travelling community , bullying a society

barrymanilow

I went to the cinema last week with a mate of mine I was visiting.The room the screen was in was very small , easily the smallest screen is been in .
There were two travellers who spent the whole time commenting and talking through the film and eating so loudly that I could hear them 4 rows back .At one stage even taking a call although he did explain he was in the cinema so the call was short lived and with no ringtone .

Pretty annoying .I was making eyes at my mate as if to hint that I was about to say something but he shook his head and said don't draw them on you .After the film my mate explained that they were two prominent figures in the local travelling community who had reputations and that everyone else in the cinema would have been annoyed too but that they knew better than to have any sort of confrontation with them as they could easily bring their whole family down on you.

Another related incident is the time I was in a busy A.E after blocking a rocket of a shot on goal with my face which pushed my teeth out through my bottom lip .It was the usual hours upon hours of waiting when a large group of travellers burst in with one of their group needing treatment for something not all together obvious , they made a massive scene , all of them shouting at the staff and the security until they just gave in and had him seen to immediately.

When it comes to the travelling community I am having a hard time reconciling my inclination towards being compassionate towards everyone in wider society with the instinct to stand up to people who have selfish disregard for everyone else around them.

How did we get here ?I think it's a fairly big problem if the general populace are in fear of a few people from a particular section of society up to the point where those people can pretty much do what they like no matter who else it impacts on .

CaptainPants

In general its the result of cultural shifts that have taken place over the past couple of hundred years. Simply put nomadic and pastoral peoples tended to have so-called 'Honour Cultures' where settled agricultural peoples tended to develop 'Cultures of Dignity'.

Settled people in most countries tended over the centuries to develop a conciliatory attitude towards their neighbours, as if you are settled in one place you can't have a massive violent blood feud every time one of their cows strays onto your land. You will still be there when the feud is over and so will they, so you are more willing to come to a resolution. Thus settled people eventually developed impartial legal systems to which they could appeal for arbitration. It is from this base that modern ideas such as human rights grew - the idea that all human beings had inherent rights not to suffer violence etc.

Nomadic and pastoral people on the other hand, tended not to develop this attitude, as not being tied to a single peice of land, there was no pressure on them to to find peaceful resolutions to problems (and usually no legal system for them to appeal to for resolutions). It was therefore actually incumbent on them to demonstrate their willingness to retaliate with violence, even before they had been wronged. You will tend to see this kind of culture anywhere that law is weak (During war, or in inner city Ghettos). In this culture there is no inherent human dignity - you tend to be willing to fight violently to defend you and your kin, but feel no obligation to anyone outside that. Thus Honour cultures tend to be more violent than Dignity Culture - hence the higher rates of violence in the American South, for example, whose white people are largely decended from sheepherders from the wilder edges of Scotland.