Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I've written in the past about broken Britain and how the youth over there are nothing but yobs but the sad truth of the matter is that it seems to be the situation all over the world ... and Bahrain is no exception.
It's no secret that factions of bored, disenchanted adolescents here on the island spend their evenings setting tyres on fire to protest about their lot in life, instead of spending the time constructively, trying to make a better one for themselves.
They disrupt the roads, block off routes and generally make a nuisance of themselves with nothing but destruction of property to show for it. But then, since it's not their property they are destroying, what do they care?
They set cars, and in a couple of cases, the drivers in them, on fire. And, yet still little is done to stop it from happening.
When defendants go to trial, their relatives crowd the court and create scenes.
The latest victims were a three-year-old-boy and his parents who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The family was driving home from the supermarket, stopped at a traffic light to wait for the lights to turn green and a 15-20-strong group of youngsters threw tyres on the road in front of their car, set fire to them and started gesturing for the father to move the car back.
The car was stuck in a queue with nowhere to go because of traffic piled up behind them, the youths got impatient and started pelting it with rocks, one of which broke through the window and hit the mother on the head as she cowered over her son to protect him from harm.
They could plainly see that there was a child in the car and that their actions could have serious or even fatal consequences and yet they didn't care in the slightest.
It's true that in this case no one was actually killed and as such it shouldn't be considered as serious as the two men who have been burned to death over the last couple of years, but the very fact that they saw a child in the car and still chose to throw rocks shows that these yobs are severely out of control and capable of anything just for the sake of ... well, nothing really.
They gain nothing by their actions and their victims are left traumatised and damaged for no good reason.
I've said it before that it's beyond me how these children's parents allow them to go out and behave the way they do.
My son is the light of my life and there is very little I wouldn't do to simply see a smile on his face but if I were to ever find out he was involved in something like that it would take an industrial-sized pneumatic drill and many hours of excavation before the authorities ever discovered his body under the tonne of cement in the backyard!
The thought of it makes my blood boil (as you might have noticed) but really how can I be surprised? There appears to be very little put in place to stop such mindless and cruel acts of terrorism - and that exactly what it is, terrorism.
A letter in the papers just one day before the attack on this family tells the tale of a group of youths that got onto a bus and started abusing, kicking, spitting at and poking some of the Indian and Filipino passengers and when a passenger got off and asked for help from the police their answer was to wave him off with the words 'stop, enough okay okay'. And, that's where my rant runs out of steam. I mean, really what else is there to say?
Well, maybe I do have a little more to stand on my soap box about, from one extreme to another. Where the youth in Bahrain seem to get away with murder it appears that in Saudi, taking your camera phone to school will earn you 90 lashes and two months in jail!
This was the punishment one 13-year-old girl was meted out by a judge for her infraction of the rules.
Depending on the report you read there are some that claim the girl allegedly refused to relinquish the phone and hit her teacher when she tried to confiscate it.
If that is the case then the child should very definitely be punished but 90 lashes and a prison sentence is so far beyond absurd it's practically impossible to comprehend.
