By Chez Pazienza: All it took was one retweet for the wrath of God to rain down on me.

Last Friday morning I did what a lot of hacky self-proclaimed online pundits were doing in the wake of Geraldo Rivera’s galactically stupid claim that the choice to wear a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed: I penned a quickie column on it for my blog.Like a lot of other ostensible progressives, however, I apparently had the bad form to not heap what I would soon learn was the universally agreed upon level of scornful indignation in Geraldo’s direction. On the contrary, while I said that Geraldo’s idiotic no-hoodie plea to American parents of brown kids was just that, idiotic, I argued that he did manage to touch on a larger issue that deserved at least some consideration. That issue is the role that someone’s wardrobe or style choices play in how that person is perceived by a large portion of the public. My point was that while I’m pretty sure Geraldo was wrong about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie having anything to do with George Zimmerman’s decision to confront and ultimately kill him, it’s common sense to note that what a person chooses to wear or adorn him or herself with influences how he or she is viewed. It may be unfair that people create preconceptions based on personal style, but that doesn’t matter one bit because that’s the way it is — and what this means is that while someone is free to wear whatever the hell he or she wants, that person has to understand that there may be unintended consequences to choosing to dress or look a certain way.

Did Geraldo Rivera have a point?

Now obviously I wasn’t saying that a kid in a hoodie deserves to be shot at for looking a little like the people Geraldo sees in stick-up surveillance videos all the time. Nor was I saying that a woman in a short skirt and high heels at a bar is asking to be sexually assaulted. I was simply arguing that while in a perfect world no one would jump to conclusions based on the way we choose to present ourselves — the key word is choice, as I’m not talking about physical characteristics that one is born with and which can’t be changed and therefore shouldn’t be judged at all on — we don’t live in a perfect world. Shouting about how a black or brown guy in a hoodie, low-slung pants and a ball cap should be able to walk the streets and not worry that people will look at him like he’s a thug and a threat is a ridiculous conceit because if you argue almost anything from the point of what should be, the whole argument becomes moot. I should be able to fly — but that’s not going to provide much consolation when I hit the sidewalk at 200 miles-an-hour. Until someone comes along and changes the reality of the situation and allows me to soar over the city, I’m gonna fall. Until someone changes perception — and I’m all for that — that perception will likely remain, and it borders on irresponsible not to be cognizant of it. Wanna buck convention? Have at it. Just understand that convention exists.

So, yeah, I dared to enter the Hysterical Indignation Vortex in the wake of the tragic and very likely criminal shooting of Trayvon Martin without expressing enough indignation to make the liberal masses happy. I know this because about ten seconds after my piece got tweeted out — admittedly by me, so I know that I get what I deserve — it was retweeted again and again and suddenly every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend or nobody-in-particular with a Twitter account and a somewhat justifiable sense of outrage at the death of Trayvon was pounding on my digital door, ready to publicly flog me for my impertinence while basically misunderstanding every goddamned thing I’d said. Some of those raking me over the coals, in fact, admitted that they found my entire premise so “repellant” that they didn’t even bother to read the piece all the way through — not surprising given both our 140-character attention spans and blinded-by-passion discourse these days, but still a lousy way to come out on top in a debate.

And it was all of this that got me thinking about Bill Maher. Namely, that he’s right.

Last week, Maher penned an op-ed in the New York Times taking aim at how we as a culture have elevated controversy — the creation of it, often by the media, and instantaneous public response to it — to almost slapstick-comical levels. It feels like we now live to be pissed off and offended — at something, at everything, at anything — and to voice that outrage in whichever direction the perceived slight is coming from until the cause of our collective torment is beaten into submission. We don’t just disagree anymore — we want to make the thing we disagree with go away. The fury comes from both sides of the political aisle and from every stripe within our society. Maher’s assertion is that we need to learn how to get the hell over things and get on with our lives — to not immediately demand an apology every time we feel that someone has publicly offended us and to not be so quick to be offended in the first place. To those accused of saying or doing something that draws a coordinated public tantrum, his advice is simple: stop apologizing.

It pretty much goes without saying that, in a wonderfully ironic meta twist befitting the current fucked-up state of our culture, Maher’s column was debated at length in the media and throughout the social networking universe in the days after it was published. In other words, it drew controversy.

In the end, though, Maher’s right. Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the Law of Unintended Controversy. There are times when someone can violate the standards of so many people so egregiously that a proportional public backlash is understandable. The problem is that it’s threatening to get to the point where it’s impossible to discern what is and isn’t a truly heinous and unacceptable affront because the machinery of indignation seems to wind up to the same deafening level for every perceived insult. As Jon Stewart once said brilliantly, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” If we react — or some large swath of us reacts — with the same fervor each time we feel like we’ve been offended, the truly offensive crap gets lost in the echo chamber.

And who decides what’s truly offensive, anyway? I get that the democratization of the media means, in theory, that only the people who are pissed off at a given slight will react and make their voices heard, but have you listened to what it’s like out there lately? After a while it all gets Cuisinarted into one dull roar — and it’s exhausting.

I’m certainly not whining about the fact that a lot of those who seem to be perpetually aggrieved unleashed their fury on me on Twitter. I put myself out there so I’m, ironically, given the nature of the subject I was writing about, asking for it. I’m also certainly not decrying social media like some antediluvian royal dismissing change from on-high. Far from it.

The point is simply that, as Bill Maher writes, if we constantly attempt to crucify those who offend our sensibilities, what we’ll inevitably be left with is a truly PC-beholden culture where no one ever says or does anything interesting. Where no one pushes boundaries. Where no one challenges us. In other words, a place where none of us, I would hope, wants to live.

We have to be able to debate and discuss without trying to decimate those who oppose us — or those who we immediately assume oppose us.

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I have been struggling to collect my thoughts about the riots in the UK this past week largely because they have affected the areas in which I grew up in London. Watching your home town being burnt and looted is not much fun, and although I am thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, the sense of despair and confusion has been very real for me. I can only imagine what Londoners must have felt this past week, and my thoughts are with them and everyone else affected by the chaos.

Now London and the other cities affected by the rioting must now come to terms with what has happened. They must clean up their streets, arrest those responsible for acts of violence, vandalism and theft, and look carefully to the future.

While politicians and newspapers talk of mindless thuggery and animalistic behavior, we must remember that those rioters are our children and our friend's children. We should condemn them for their behavior, but we should also try to understand them.

Their behavior while inexcusable is, and must be understandable. Why? Because the youths rioting are not apart from our society – they are our society. Their values reflect the larger values of our society as a whole.

In an era of selfish capitalism where wealth and status trump all, where worth is dictated by the ability to earn money and celebrities are valued more than doctors, looting and vandalism are a logical outcome. The wealthiest sectors of our population looted us through the banks and our goverment rewarded them with free money. There were no consequences for the theft of billions of pounds for the wealthy, but when society is run for them and by them, the dichotomy should not come as a surprise.

When the poor loot, they are thrown in jail. When the banks destroyed the notion of society with their greed, it is business as usual. When the poor and disenfranchized do it, we call them scum.

In London, the riots took place in some of the most impoverished areas in the country. The map below charts the relationship between the rioting and the poverty of the given area. Suffice to say, the riots did not take place in Mayfair or Chelsea:

Anyone who knows London is acutely aware of the giant disparity between rich and poor. It has gotten worse over the years resulting in an apartheid society where the classes rarely mix and resentment boils beneath the surface. I barely recognize the neighborhood in which I grew up. The property prices are now so high that no one I grew up with can afford to live there, and it has become increasly white and upper class. Still, behind the million pound homes are the government council estates where crime is rife and unemployment staggeringly high. Every day the children growing up on those estates walk past neatly trimmed front gardens with BMWs and Mercedes parked in front of them, knowing full well their lives will never resemble those residing in the alarmed mansions behind them.

Last summer, I spoke with my cousin who taught in one of the roughest parts of London for 'Teach First', and American inspired organization that puts bright teachers in troubled schools. I asked him honestly how many of his students he thought would have the sort of life he or I had – one with promise and aspiration. "Maybe 3-5%," he told me quietly.

You just have to look at the statistics to see what has gone wrong with British society. We rank bottom out of the OECD nations when it comes to social mobility. That means statistically speaking it is impossible to be born poor and become middle class or rich in Britain. We have some of the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world, London being the child poverty capital of Europe. And with the current governments extreme austerity measures, it isn't getting any better. Those teenagers ransacking the streets of London, Birmingham and Manchester may not know the statistics, but they know the reality. The flat screen TVs and designer shoes they were stealing are held up as signs of status and wealth in British society, and simple mathematics dictates that making £6 an hour at McDonalds won't exactly enable them to live the dream.

The lives of Britain's working poor are unimaginable to people like David Cameron or Boris Johnson. They are unimaginable to the journalists and tv presenters whose backgrounds are overwhelmingly white and middle class. On top of the class issue in Britain, there is a race problem that also requires serious attention. On top of wealth inequality, Black and Asian people in London are more than 6 times as likely to be searched by the police than whites. The consequences of this type of discrimination are not difficult to predict – resentment builds up and can explode at any given moment. Almost all of the major riots over the past 30 years were the direct result of racial discrimination by the police – the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, the second Toxteth and Brixton riots in 1985 and the Broadwater Farm riots the same year, the Brixton riots again in 1995 and in 2011 Tottenham, Clapham, Ealing, Brixton and all over London in 2011.

A friend of mine of Jamaican origin once told me that her teenage son had been stopped 16 times in one month while driving his moped. He had worked on weekends to save up for his bike and had never stolen a thing in his life. How on earth could David Cameron, a product of Eton and Oxford, understand the psychological impact of that type of experience? My friends son is an exceptional person and never let the experiences affect his belief in himself. I'm not sure I could say the same thing about myself.

For many other Black and Asian youths in London, the constant harassment and prejudice begins to isolate them from society. They do not feel accepted or wanted by the country they were born in, and the police and government become the mortal enemy. They see no future for themselves in Britain because reality dictates there isn't one. 

It is impossible to have a civil society when there are such extremes of inequality. When citizens at one end of the spectrum own the vast majority of the country's wealth, and those at the other end have nothing, eventually the disequilibrium becomes unsustainable.

David Cameron has described the riots as 'criminality, pure and simple'. But they were not. The underclass he has written off has no means to express itself. They are not represented in government, in corporate Britain or the media, so they lash out in the only way they know how.

In an NBC report shown on American television, a man from Tottenham was asked if he thought the rioting had achieved anything. "Yes," he replied. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night, a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

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