How do you think the thugs who've been busily bashing the vulnerable in the Lower Hunter in recent weeks would see you and me? I'm sure they'd see me in the same way they saw Rikky Moncrieff as they bashed him senseless and jammed a broken glass or bottle into his face as he lay on the ground at the weekend at Birmingham Gardens. The only difference between Mr Moncrieff and me is opportunity. The low-lifes who king hit 62-year-old William Briggs at Beresfield railway station, and who appear to have put the boot into him as he lay unconscious on the ground, would gladly do the same to you and me if they had the opportunity. The gang of louts at Swansea - you know, the gang police and pollies told us did not exist - would be as delighted to bash you and me, separately of course, as they have been to bash any number of people in that Lake Macquarie suburb.
What is it that drives these young thugs to violence? In my column in the Herald today I put forward the proposition that they see themselves as separate from the community, and that this sense of separation has evolved to become isolation then animosity and finally hostility. We are seen, I suggest, as the enemy, and all is fair in war. But I don't know. I don't know how these young people can justify in their own minds patrolling the community for vulnerable people to bash and, as in the broken glass, to perhaps blind.
Do you know what drives them, what's going on in their head?
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