Anybody from England Want to Weigh in on This?

This is taken, verbatim, from a SomethingAwful forum post. I find it believable, given what else I've read is going on over there, but I'd like some first-person commentary on it. If true, the situation is far worse than I thought it was, and if the populace ever grows a pair, there's literally going to be some blood in the streets.

Yesterday I was in town with a friend. I did some shopping and then I got on a bus to go home. I caught on the 2A, a double-decker, and embarked on a journey that generally lasts about 30-40 minutes. It was pretty busy. I found a seat at the back of the top deck and sat down.

A couple of stops later, four girls boarded the bus and came up to the top deck. I will attempt to use my humble grasp of the written word to convey these girls' appearance and general attitude as best as I can, but I am making no promises. It was one of those cases where you wish you could record the whole thing because otherwise the story will lack the full impact it needs when you tell it afterwards. This is quite an exciting and dramatic story, however-- well, not really, but it is by my standards-- so do read on.

Only British people will fully understand me when I explain that these girls could be fitted with no uncertain ease into the social group called 'chavs'. I consider myself to be a reasonably well-travelled individual for someone of my age and nowhere other than Britain-- and only within the past two or three years or so at the most-- have I observed these fascinating new breed of people. I also consider myself, or used to consider myself, to be a reasonably fair-minded and unprejudiced kind of guy, which is why it pains me so greatly to feel such a pang of apprehension whenever I spot someone in a baseball cap and designer sportswear approaching me and am almost always rewarded for my hesitation to deal with them with nothing other than sincere mistrust and apprehension. To accept a chav with welcoming arms is usually to invite a fist into your mouth, which quite often happens anyway (as this story will demonstrate). I don't have it in me to type out a detailed summary of everything that makes a chav a chav, but I will, for the benefit of the uninitiated Americans reading this, explain that they are almost invariably ignorant, aggressive, offensive people and something I consider to be quite an alarming (and growing) social problem in the United Kingdom at the moment. For more (and even less forgiving) details, visit www.chavscum.co.uk.

The girls that got on my bus were in their very early teens-- they could have been ten or eleven, even, but no older than fourteen years old. They wore expensive (stolen) sportswear, baseball caps and hoop earrings. They held mobile phones in one hand and packets of cigarettes in the other. They were all scowling. Their arrival was unmissable. They shrieked, screamed, and filled the air with expletives. They fought their way to the back of the bus and I felt my heart sink, because it is at the back of double-decker buses that these people feel most able to violate the anti-smoking laws. I sunk into my seat and read a travel brochure, and listened to them.

They were unbelievable. Unbearable. I've never witnessed such screaming obnoxiousness from anyone. They sat around calling each other every name under the fucking sun, rang people up on their phones and had epic domestics with them, accused one another of stealing one another’s' boyfriends-- oh, and, of course, lit up their fucking cigarettes and blew the smoke all over the fucking bus (which is a pet peeve of mine as it is, as a non-smoker). Once again I'd like to stress that I can't fully convey how incredibly, cosmically vile these four girls were-- these weren't just eye-rollingly irritating, they were offensive, harmful, obnoxious, selfish cunts. And I don't call people cunts a lot. (Although the girls did.)

After about five minutes of loudly entertaining themselves, they started voicing even louder opinions about the other people on the bus. One of them screamed "Eurgh! Why are there fucking foreigners on my bus?" when a black man and his baby arrived and found a seat. (Incredibly, as we were all attempting to do, he ignored them.) They started discussing someone sitting a few seats in front of me, a man with vaguely long hair, and (still very loudly) debating whether or not "it was a man or a girl". Eventually one of them said "go up and ask it!"-- and they did. They strutted up to the poor bastard's seat and demanded to know his gender. When he said "I'm a man", they told him to get his hair cut. This general behaviour continued for several minutes.

What I found most incredible about this situation was everyone else's reaction to it. Everyone just stared out of the window. There was absolutely no way that any of them could have missed any of this— the girls clearly had hearing difficulties and found it necessary to communicate with one another by shrieking in one others' faces. I debated for a long time as to whether or not I should risk trying to ask them to shut the fuck up, but couldn't work up the courage. Eventually, however, someone else got on the bus and restored some semblance of balance to the Force-- a guy in a bus company jacket.

Instead of putting their cigarettes out and shutting the hell up, they rose to the challenge. The girls and the bus company dude clearly knew each other from a previous engagement, because they approached him and said "'Ey, you're the fuckin' twat who told us to stop smoking last week!". He told them yes, and that he'd have them kicked off the bus again if they didn't quieten down. They didn't quieten down. They persisted in winding the guy up until finally he snapped, spun around, and started screaming at them in turn.

At this point the Drama level on this bus shot from a 6 to a 9.2. The four girls began pushing and shoving the bus company guy, who was clearly having some difficulty resisting the urge to just pick them up and throw through the window himself. The level of verbal abuse involved here beats anything, I think, I have previously witnessed in my life (and I should once again remind everyone that these girls were about twelve years old). I have experienced louder events, but only because I've seen Muse in concert. It was amazing to witness-- and most amazing at all was the British public's sustained ability to simply turn a blind eye and pretend it's not happening. I watched in horror. And then one of them let off a stink bomb.

They started screaming that "everyone on the bus fuckin' stinks", writhing around in disgust and mock-vomiting. One of them spat on the floor and proudly exclaimed "I've just been sick!! I've just been sick!". The bus guy looked lost for words, frozen with disbelief and horror.

I said, "Jesus Christ-- if you think it stinks so bad, get off the bus!". The bus guy said "Thanks, mate, thanks!". The girls turned to me and started screaming at me instead. The term "a word in edgeways" came to mind; it was like being repeatedly pummelled by a giant verbal battering ram and all of its shrieking friends. One of them screamed that if I 'said another word' they would 'hit me and blind me because my glasses would smash and go in my eyes'.

I said another word. One of them hit me in the face. This did not especially hurt, but, rather than shattering them, sent my glasses onto the floor. I grabbed one of them and realised there was nothing I could particularly do here without being arrested; and as I did it, they screamed "that's assault, that's assault!". I don't know where the bus company guy was at this point; I think he must have gone downstairs to get the bus driver (something he seemed to have done a few times before, although the bus hadn't stopped). I managed to fish around and locate my glasses before one of the other fuckers did first, which would have spelled disaster for me in the long-term. I sat back down again, boiling with rage, as they circled my seat, shouting abuse and laughing like they were fucking gangsters instead of prepubescent girls. And still none of the other passengers did anything.

This led me into something of a stalemate. I was effectively trapped, as the bus was moving and wouldn't reach another stop for a few more minutes. One of them thrust a lighter behind my head and singed my hair. I grabbed her wrist, and one of her friends stubbed her own lit cigarette out on my knuckles. This made me feel a bit like The Terminator because having a cigarette stubbed out on you does not hurt as much as you think it's going to and thus I was able to maintain an air of preserved cool. However, the girls didn't seem particularly impressed, so I let go of the girl's wrist and stood up. I grabbed my bag and shoved past them. One of them attempted to block my path.

I am a 19 year-old, heavily-built male. I could have reduced the girl's idiot skull to a broken Easter egg. I knew that if I did this I would not be given any kind of prize, despite administering a great deal of justice to the universe at large. Instead I kind of flipped out and screamed to the other people on the bus: "Will somebody fucking help me?!" This seemed to do the trick, because as everyone finally stopped pretending and turned to look, the girl seemed to lose her nerve.

As I made my way to the stairs to go to the bottom deck, I noticed my wallet had fallen on the floor. The girl who had blocked my path stamped on it; I lunged towards her and she fell backwards. I grabbed the wallet and went downstairs. As I went down the steps the girl spat on my hair.

The bus company guy was pleading with the driver to stop the bus. The man seemed terrified; not of us, but, I suppose, from what he'd been watching on the camera monitor (and choosing to ignore). We managed to persuade him to pull over and confront them. I don't know how he managed to get them to respect any variety of authority, but he managed it, because a moment later all four of them marched downstairs. As they did so, one of them shoved at me and attempted to spit at me again (but missed this time). This caused everyone on the lower deck to gasp in horror and mumble things like "disgusting" and "atrocious behaviour". As we pulled away, they banged and spat on the windows, and, as a final insult, managed to open the vehicle’s rear engine, meaning the driver had to pull over again a moment later to close it.

The whole experience cost me £2.60.

I have learnt two things from all this.

1) My worst fears about the social problem in Britain are confirmed. I don't mean to get political, but there is an increasing growth in the amount of aggressive and violent crime in the United Kingdom at the moment, and that's only one measurable facet of the problem. I also don't mean to come across as prejudiced when I say that it's an entirely working-class phenomenon; low-income, broken families are giving birth to this rising generation of aggressive, ignorant, cheating pricks. They're the same people who I have to serve in my shop every week (although, thankfully, I am leaving the job very soon, having been abused, deceived, threatened and nearly stabbed too many times); and they're the same people who spend their time punching people on buses.

2) I am increasingly convinced that the reason they are able to survive in society is because we tolerate them. An unfeeling sociopath who cannot be reasoned with has incredible power over any unprotected, reasonable individual, because the sociopath is prepared to do things that a 'normal' person will not. On that bus, unhelped by anyone other than the bus company guy, I was helpless; if I'd attempted to defend myself I would have been held legally responsible for assault, whereas a 12 year-old hitting a 19 year-old in the face is practically encouraged by the law. But if everyone on that bus had immediately addressed the problem and stood up to those arrogant, unfeeling cunts, then the problem would have been quashed immediately. It filled me with relief to see everyone openly damning them as they were kicked off the bus, but also enraged me to see how most people will only do it when they feel they are safe.

When I got home, I found that I had lost my house keys-- they must have fallen out of my pocket too, at some point. My sister let me in.

I smelled of cigarette smoke and stink bomb gas and I had idiot DNA in my hair. I took a shower. It didn't wash away my PAIN.

EDIT: a lot of people are questioning why I didn't attempt kill my aggressors. This is for a few reasons.

1) I do not enjoy physical confrontation and do not believe that hitting any of these prepubescent girls would have helped matters. Similarly, I'm in the camp that says that hitting someone who hits you simply for the purposes of revenge doesn't restore balance to the universe.

It's not revenge, it's DISCIPLINE.

2) It was easier and smarter simply to keep pushing them off me and try and get downstairs than actively attempting to wrestle any of them to the ground.
3) When I 'squealed for help', as one kind poster put it, I was not, in fact, in tears, or physically unable to move my obstacle. I was attempting to draw peoples' blind eyes to the mess that was going on in front of them, because it was at that point that I just snapped and thought "Why is everyone allowing this to happen?"

Because that is the way the State has trained you to behave, that's why.

At the end of the day, I basically won: I inflicted no harm on them, and got them kicked off the bus. I was 100% in the right the whole time. However, I will acknowledge that I did effectively get owned by a bunch of 12 year-old girls and agree that part of my masculinity will now be gone forever.

No sir. You lost, and so did your culture.

Sweet bleeding jeebus.