I don’t think you were dead wrong – the welfare state has a little bit to do with it. Even the rich kids that are doing it for a thrill are influenced by the arguments for the welfare state. I think they even empathise with it in a strange way. Like the fact that that the biggest consumers of rap music are middle-class white boys – they want to be relate to something cool. Aspiring to be like your middle-class parents just isn’t that exciting, and so they romanticise the “street life.”
But now here I go reading deeper meaning into things…[/quote]
Pri: Well… If one wanted to be truly “Classist”, one might make the argument that the “feral” inner-city kids had better street sense, instincts and were in better physical shape than their middle- and upper-middle class peers and were thus able to outrun the police and thus not wind up in the dock facing the magistrate.
