Why I hate the term 'anti-social behavior'.

Before I start, I want to make clear that I do not condone this behaviour. I think that I make this abundantly clear throughout this piece, but I can imagine some obtuse people would look at the writing at its face-value and not delve into its sub-text.

I fucking hate the term 'anti-social behaviour'. To me it reeks of the over-sanitised, over cautious and over sensitive discourse that infects our culture. Political correctness is a cancer and when it spreads to people who abuse the relative civility of our world, you know it's malignant. I'll expand upon this point later, but for now, let's conjugate the term 'anti-social behaviour', because at its base form, it could mean anything. In its most extreme case, the act of being social, one would assume, is to communicate to a person's fellow peers; he is an extrovert: the life and soul of the party, putting it around more than the bitches' from The Only Way is Essex vaginal draught. In a more subtle case, the act of being sociable can also apply to those with more than one brain-cell. You could be a quiet maladjusted wanker like I am, but you do have the courtesy to talk to others and lend them your ear when shit goes down for them. In essence, the human animal is a social animal. He needs company to sustain his existence, otherwise he'll die broken-hearted. Never mind the trite nonsense that people spew when they say they hate people (for the record, I'm one of those people) because that is to do with taste, not the primeval need for companionship embroidered into our being. I'm waffling now, but to summarise, the act of being social is being aware of other people and conversing with them.

Now, put away all of your preconceptions of what the term 'anti-social' means and analyse it in reference to the previous paragraph. What does 'anti-social' truly mean? It can be something as simple as ignoring someone at a party, for example. Say you're at your friend's house party and your ex-girlfriend arrives, her cheap cologne suffocating you, killing the cells in your throat from one painful popped nucleus to another. She walks up to you and says 'Hi'. You ignore her. You anti-social bastard. In mere semantics, you're now on the same page as those with anti-social orders; you have transgressed societal norms by ignoring an interlocutor, so you're anti-social. I keep using that word because I want to highlight how utterly ridiculous the term is in its common usage. There's a huge difference between ignoring someone and bricking an old woman's windows in yet the two distinct actions can be labelled as 'anti-social'. True, one is a criminal act and the other would just burn social bridges, but the point of the matter is is that these two disparate actions share a unity in that they can be called the same thing. The term 'anti-social' need not exist anyway; the act of ignoring people can be, and generally is, referred to as being rude or ignorant; while the criminal use of the term can be termed 'thuggery' because that's what it is. You and I call thse people thugs; it is only the official people, the ones who do not need to deal with them directly in their daily lives, who call them 'anti-social'.

This goes back to one of the first points I made about political correctness. Why can't the two actions have different terms? In its words, anti-social behaviour just means transgressing what is expected of one in a social situation. While this can be labelled to the criminal act, that of opposing the norms imposed by the law, it is such an understatement. Beating up an old lady is anti-social? Yes, but 'anti-social' doesn't even begin to cover it; it's thuggery or yobbery. Are people afraid of offending these crooks? Don't call them ASBOs, call them thugs because that's what they are. Calling them that will make the lifestyle of an ASBO less attractive to children. As dubious as he may seem, Frankie Boyle hit the nail on the head when he said that ASBOs and Super ASBOs will make children want them because they sound 'cool'. (To me, ASBO sounds like an STD, but that's beside the point). By calling these scum 'thugs', the police can establish a reputation as a non-nonsense organisation not content with prosecuting people under vaguely defined and erroneous terms, but in straight down the line, bullshit-free labels that restore people's confidence in them and deter the would-be criminals; you're no longer the clinical 'ASBO' but the hateful thug. Reserve the 'anti-social' tag to those who are really anti-social; the miserable twats like me who just stand there and never talk to anyone; don't dare compare me to thugs who assault innocents because they too are 'anti-social'.

May be I'm thinking much too deeply about this, but it is an issue for me because I used to be called 'anti-social' as a child because I didn't mix well with others. If I were labelled that today and someone overheard it, they'd mistakenly think that I mug single mothers, not put me in for confidence counselling. It annoys me as a law-abiding citizen that these criminals can be called such a tame term. But what do I know? Words mean nothing after all, they only comprise our language.