If you read nothing else today, read this:
According to my wife, who was at a stop sign just feet from the altercation, two older men were arguing and one threatened to shoot the other. The second suggested the first didn’t have a gun. yelled. Challenged, fellow number one pulled out his gun and waved it around a bit. She didn’t wait around to see if anyone was shot, but pulled quickly in to the school yard and told the security guards there. They told her to call 9-1-1 and went back into their cubicle. She she just called me in anger and went back to work. There were no bodies lying on the corner when she went back past.
This kind of altercation is disturbing enough, but what rattled me was my daughter’s reaction when she go home tonight. Her friends thought that my wife had completely overreacted. “She must not be from a very big city,” she reported was their response. To these kids, some of whom go to very hard schools in the inner city, this was no big deal; just another day in the City That Care Forgot.
[snip]
Its bad enough that we’ve let one set of children become predators in an urban jungle. We must not let our own children think that this is a normal way to live, or the jungle will prevail and there will be no safe place of retreat. Even if we all flee the animals, deprived of prey, will simply follow us. And for all of our fine rationalizations based on prejudice or economics or politics as to why things have turned out this way, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Read it all.
Mark’s post, on the surface, is about NOLA…. but the problem is much, much bigger than that.
Yes, it’s a problem in New Orleans… but it’s also happening in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Houston and St. Louis. Barack Obama touched on it in Dreams From My Father, when he wrote about young men with dead eyes in Chicago.
It’s all across the country, in every major urban area.
Is it possible to turn this around? I hope so, because what we’re talking about here is our future.