re: #79 McSpiff

Hell, I live in a city of 300,000 in a province of about a million. There are areas the cops won’t go without a certain show of force. Just the way it is.

I understand how it works that way around the world. It does not change the fact that it is a national tragedy that is fixable. It does not change the fact that we are not willing to spend the time, money and effort to fix it.

There is no justification for it.

Now to be fair, fixing it would require some years of dedicated effort. There is an entire cycle of poverty, violence and learned helplessness to be overcome. It requires a generation that mostly went to school.

Simply building public housing will not work. simply giving food stamps will not work. That is the great failure of the “great society.” All it did was put people in a category that made the rest of America think that they did not need to be looked at anymore, while paradoxically locking them into their situations even further.

It is the same situation that the suburbs of Paris have with their Muslim immigrants.

Successful social programs must allow the security to build small businesses, and for the children to become educated. There have to be other options than simply living on the crumbs grudgingly given by the state. There have to be real opportunities available. The only way to do that is to create those opportunities. That is the only way to break the cycle. It also requires a very no- nonsense approach to the gangs.