Saturday, October 1, 2016

Chicago's inner city reality


The BBC recently made a short documentary titled 'The lost streets of Chicago'.  It's less than 15 minutes long, but it reveals the tragic reality of inner-city life there.  It's worth your time to watch it.  After you've done so, I'll have a few things to say about it.





Finished it?  Well, think about these things.

  1. How many families did you see - fathers, mothers and children all living together?  There were virtually none.  Family life is largely non-existent in our inner-city ghettoes.  The result is that children grow up without the role models of father, mother and family stability that the rest of us take for granted.  That, in turn, feeds the nihilistic self-destructiveness of ghetto life.
  2. Notice how everybody blames everyone except themselves for the problems.  It's always someone else's fault - the Man, the gangs, the system, the police, etc.  If it isn't some one else, it's some thing else:  drugs, or guns, or whatever.  No-one's willing to say, "The problem starts with me, and if I want to change it, I have to start by changing myself."
  3. Notice, too, how everyone simply goes along with the daily routine.  They accept the problems as a fact of life, and wait for outside intervention to deal with them.  They won't - perhaps they believe they can't - do anything about them for themselves.  In most of the places I've lived, that attitude is conspicuous by its absence.  If that sort of violence began to creep in, neighbors would form watches to keep an eye on their own streets.  If some individuals didn't adhere to the unspoken social compact, they wouldn't be around for long . . . one way or another.  (See, for example, how we kept order in Louisiana after Hurricane Gustav in 2008.  What's stopping inner-city locals doing the same for their own communities?)
  4. The people involved are human beings, with human feelings, emotions, etc.  However, when they get together in their gangs - as demonstrated by the rapping youngsters waving guns at the camera - they stifle those feelings and emotions, and become high on a group dynamic of destructive behavior.  The police and the authorities, of course, respond to those groups as groups, rather than as individuals - so those in need of help to change don't get it, because they're never addressed as individuals.  It's a no-win situation for both sides.
  5. Basically, the authorities don't care.  They could stop this nonsense almost overnight by cracking down hard;  but that would take a large investment of money, and time, and staff, and a lot of hard work.  They don't have those things to spare . . . so they ignore the reality of the situation, and paper over the cracks.

Food for thought, indeed.

Peter

11 comments:

c w swanson said...

Excellent points, all of them. I guess the trick would be convincing each individual, one at a time, to totally reverse their world view. Possible? Maybe the only hope would be to start with the children and try to raise them up with traditional values, and treat the adults one at a time, when they are willing. Tough job indeed.

JK Brown said...

Back in the 1990s, I had a friend who patrolled the Projects in a Southeastern city. Working with the older residents, they, the police, the officers who worked the areas, got them cleaned up of shootings and drug dealing using trespassing, loitering, other laws. One of the elderly residents, whose bedroom was above the brick line was able to sleep in her bed after many years without worrying about stray bullets coming through the wall.

But then along came Clinton's, i.e, Democrats) Housing and Urban Developments with a rule that all the public housing in the country had to follow the same rules and put an end to the stepped up enforcement based on the Projects being "private" (housing authority) property.

It was only a year or so before the Projects were back to their same shooting gallery past.

When you say "the authorities", we should know that is mostly the Democrats.

Keep in mind, the "Curley" Effect. Every resident who escapes is no longer a reliable Democratic Party voter. My hope is Trump has disrupted this cycle.

mark leigh said...

Welcome to the "Great Society" of broken families and no hope. I'm not saying the last 50 years of social support legislation was deliberately designed to provoke this result but rational people warned of it and the enablers of dysfunction passed the programs in to law. The US paid good money to create this problem and the solution will never be throwing more money down the rathole.
In the name of compassion redistribution has helped to ensnare generations in mindlessness and created a class of irresponsible entitled children and given them the power to demand more, We all know of course that this will not end well.
Keep your powder dry and know your neighbors.

Anonymous said...

The first four points you make about attitude and approach apply equally well to Americans outside the ghetto, too. 1. Family life is largely non-existent as children with two working parents are raised by government employees and advertisers programming TV. 2. It's always someone else's fault - evil politicians; never evil voters obeying politicians who mirror their evil. 3. They accept the problems as a fact of life, and wait for outside intervention to deal with them, in the persons of Hillary, Bernie, Cruz, Trump, etc. 4. They become high on a group dynamic of destructive behavior and ruin the lives of peaceful, productive illegal aliens. The modern KKK. Point five is incorrect. The authorities like it this way, the chaos justifies the need for more authorities.

tweell said...

The authorities could stop it... but as soon as they're gone, it would start right back up. Look at NYC, it was cleaned up for a while, but with a socialist mayor back in charge, the Big Apple is looking pretty worm-eaten again. Also, The Lightworker President Obama would do his best to impede any authority crackdown, he's been doing that all along.

Our republic is set up by and for a high-trust society. It doesn't work for anything else. These folks and the way they roll is not high-trust. There are reasons for that, and some are very good reasons, but the fact remains that our laws do not work well for their current behavior.

deb harvey said...

if the police cracked down how many lawsuits would they face?
also, how many new jails to house the new inmates?

start with the boys. show them fatherhood and the satisfaction of completing projects.
at the first grade level.
remake 'the knows best' with black stars.
show them these programs every day.
it will sink in.
the schools have the kids for hours. make those hours count in good ways.

of course this will never happen.

the man in the film said 'pray'.
if only!

deb harvey said...

p.s. i notice they all had much nicer vehicles than mine, they all had plenty to eat, and their housing was tremendously much nicer than any i lived in as a child.
what is their problem? they are living high on the hog.
their poverty is the rich man's way of life in most nations.

Rolf said...

They just need a good community organizer, that's all, right? Someone to bring people together, not be a divider or race-baiter trying to point the finger and do nothing but ask for money and unions. I'm sure someone like that will make everything all better, especially if we get someone like that at the top, right?

/sarc

deb harvey said...

note;
the program i tried to cite above was 'father knows best'.

Anonymous said...

All I know is that as a white male all their problems are my fault. Somehow.

zuk said...

To anon at 1:43

Holy cr@p you really think those are equivalent? OR are you trolling? Because it's pretty clear that there is an order of magnitude difference at least. Where are the hundreds of white ghettos filled with feral youth roaming in street gangs? Where are the multi-block white neighborhoods where you can't go out at night or where gunfire is constant and ever present? If you DO manage to find one or two in the WHOLE country, how is that equivalent to the number and pervasiveness of those neighborhoods in Chicago alone, not even counting EVERY other city in the country?

I grew up in the south of Chicago. I'm familiar with the area and its problems. I could identify the major gangs by how they stood, how they crossed their arms, what earrings they wore,how they dressed. I used to be able to read the tags.

The problems associated with the gangs, drugs, and violence are NOT things you can negate by pointing and hooting out "KKK!!!111!!1"

It's pretty clear, for those who LOOK, that the social programs of the compassionate left have destroyed the black family, destroyed the black middle class, destroyed any upward mobility, and been an unmitigated individual and societal failure.

One of the interviewees said it best- Some of the older guys NEED to die. It's the only way it will change. (but even that ignores that the younger guys TURN INTO those older guys.)


Glib denials, and false equivalencies will not change the facts. Chicago (and urban America in general) has a GANG violence problem, not a GUN violence problem. It is a cultural issue, and thus a problem of "people", not one of "things." Until you acknowledge that it is PEOPLE who are acting this way, of their own free will, then you can not even HOPE to change it. PEOPLE are BAD, doing BAD THINGS. They will continue doing so until they are changed. Any proposal that doesn't address the people and the culture fails before it even begins.

zuk