Murder in New York
I was talking with my son who lives near Chicago about Detroit and I told him I couldn’t see why Detroit is still called “Murder City” when Chicago seems to be riddled with murders. Chicago has somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people, Detroit has less than a million and New York has about 8 million. I know there is a new show coming out on TV called “Detroit 187”. Some aren’t happy with the show about crime but I say if they film it in Michigan, I’m all for it, anything to give someone a job. I tried to check into the murder capital thing and I discovered something very disturbing.
I don’t know if Detroit is the murder capital but I do know that a murder map I found for New York was very upsetting to me. According to the map it looks like young “Black” and “Latino” men are being killed left and right. http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map
These are the stats: 61% of the victims are Black, 27% Latino, 8% White and 3% Asian. The majority of both the perpetrators and the victims are male and young, you know, like under 34.
I find all of this very troubling for our country. Our children are supposed to be our best and brightest. Children aren’t born criminals. Like an animal in a cage, treated with abuse, sometimes they will turn to violence. I’m appalled that more isn’t being done to curb this violence and start these young children out on the right track. No parent wants to raise a killer. I cannot believe that this is something born in these people. I do think there is a deep sense of hopelessness in our youth that are stuck in these huge cities with very few alternatives to make money except for selling drugs or joining the military. I’m sure they can make more money selling the drugs or doing some other illicit deed than getting a real job. Real jobs are hard to find any way, harder if you have little education and no familial structure to help support you.
There is a vast divide between the rich and the poor in this country. History books try to cover this up with platitudes about how this is the “Land of the free.” Much chatter is devoted to the “rags to riches” stories that are really just a bunch of bullshit like a carrot on a stick. It’s something to appease the masses to make them feel that they too can become rich some day. Some maybe make it, but for the most part, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” We can see this in all aspects of politics and entertainment. We see legacies from different families for both those areas. If you come from the right family, you will excel and be given special opportunities. However, this isn’t just true with these two areas. It is also true with most small towns and suburban communities. We hire our own in these places and teacher’s kids and cop’s kids get breaks that aren’t necessarily available to the very poor.
I mention all of this because I wonder who is there for these young men in these cities to mentor them and give them special treatment. Probably the only people left are the lowest elements of our society. I am troubled that these young men seem to be “throw away people”. Nobody seems to care about them. If politicians cared, they would devote more money to education, cleaning up the blight in these big cities, and doing everything possible to promote a strong economy rather than just building more prisons and hiring more cops! Where is the outrage of this blight in America? Who cares enough about our troubled young Black and Hispanic men to actually do something about it?
So many people have touted the Bush tax cuts and so many loved Ronald Reagan but I find it interesting that the income gap between the rich and the poor is at an eighty year high.
http://washingtonindependent.com/91038/with-income-gap-at-80-year-high-solutions-remain-elusive
If you look at it, the incarceration rate really went up since the time of Reagan. I really don’t know what to make of this except that I also know that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer during this time.
There has to be connections between all of these factors. I don’t have all the answers. I just feel that our country has some pretty screwed up priorities. It seems like we’d rather be perpetually at war, feeding the war profiteers and the oil industry or extolling the virtues of the wealthy through shows like Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” and “Extra” that follows around the rich and famous to give us a birds eye view of their celebrity life; than educating our youth and creating a safe, productive environment where we can all have a piece of the pie. Our number one priority in our country should be our youth and it simply is not!