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Hmmm. Many (poor/working) parents in a lot of communities have worked 2/3 jobs for decades and children were raised to know right from wrong. IMO, it is the lack of responsibility and accountability at a the high levels of government and corporate discourse that has given carte blanche to anti-social behaviors that lead all of us to blame someone else for the “problem”. We have all been commoditized to suit the purposes of corporate entities that dictate what the common good is – but only for majority stockholders and CEOs.
I recently watched a documentary about the evolution of the gladiator class in Rome. It was fascinating to see how bread and circuses came to be and the amount of money spent to promote and propagate them across the Roman Empire to perpetuate the power of the ruling class; Republic be damned. “F*ck the poor!” to quote the Roman Senate line from Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Pt. I”. And they do. How many current U.S. Senators and Representatives were NOT millionaires before being elected to represent the interests of the people?
But we can effect change, collectively and individually. As highlighted by the recent postings on PW, awareness is everything. Noticing allows the chance to make a choice to do better. As ever, I remain hopeful that there is a mass(ive) awakening taking place that will put more than one grown-up in the discussion who is willing to give voice to the hard choices needed to get us evolving in a more positive and loving direction. The planet really needs it.
Peace
Patty:
I have to disagree, in part, because of cause and effect. Governments do play a big part in this. Governments can and do kill people by guns, by bombs and by policy. All it takes is a budget provision.
Weakened economies make parents less available – you need to work two to three jobs to make ends meet. Governments that side pro-business and against workers make for a wage slave state. The cost of health care, unregulated, is devastating to the elderly, who have worked hard and have been poor like you and me, contributing to Medicare and Soc Sec all their working lives. The anticipation of what may happen would make anyone rise from the grave. The possibility that the tax breaks for the rich would continue in perpetuity is criminal.
We are fighting from becoming a national work gulag in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. And those are the states where Republicans won – after carefully crafted messages and a false revolution funded by millionaires. This is a movement that corporations, and particularly Republicans are fighting for.
I have a rather different approach to this issue than others, because I DO work in prisons, and I also, as my day job, work for the city’s school district. The allocation of funds to more needy neighborhoods are “re-prioritized” when parents and civic leaders from more affluent sections of the city come leaning on the school board, or beat on the Mayor’s of supervisors’ door with threat of pulling contributions from their re-election funds. This IS about government. The government of dis-abuse, of corruption, of pay for play. Money talks.
Now, everyone says BOTH parties do it. But the sheer tenacity and downright cold-heartedness of the conservatives of this country are sending the flower of this country — children — to the sewer. This is a party that is bit by bit deleting real history from schoolbooks, pushing to eliminate public schools altogether, and denying women their right to choose. They use government to interfere with how a woman can terminate a pregnancy, calling a woman who undergoes a miscarriage a murderer.
Its not just video games. The video games are what the kids need right now to distract themselves, most probably because of the bullshit they see their parents have to swallow on a day to day basis. I don’t know about how anyone else feels here, but I think unless we break through the top that’s trying to smash us as a democracy and a literate and compassionate society, we have a snowball’s chance in hell to survive. If we sleep through this, we deserve whatever happens to us.
I do not discount anything government does because that blinds us to the complete portrait.
I’d think it has more to do with the violent games, tv and movies. No one went to more poor schools than I, but we somehow managed – peer pressure was quite a lot different in the 60s. A lot of parents are absent from the kids lives today, from what I’ve seen, or just plain drunk all the time. I now know of three children in our community, who have shot other children in just the last few months!!! Two of the shootings were intentional. it is absolutely incredible. A co-worker’s 15 year old nephew shot and killed a store clerk during a robbery in another part of town. Guess that makes it 4 I know of personally.
We all have horror stories, but what are we doing about it? I have a real distaste for blaming government. Why not own the problems locally? Maybe horsewhipping the parents would not be a bad place to start, for raising kids to be killers. Right from wrong is still learned at home. Public stocks could make a comeback yet. Yes I am angry about this. 4 kids lives ruined, two dead, one permanently injurred and on and on.
haha – fe, i think we just came at the same issue from slightly different angles, but with the same idea. 🙂
yeah, it’s astonishing, gary. and the prison system is dragging down more and more “juvenile offenders,” usually in ways that pretty much guarantee they will continue failing for life. and now we have the move toward privatized prisons. once it becomes big business, there is less reason (to some minds) to reduce it and compelling reasons to keep growing the “industry.”
really twisted.
every once in a while i’m moved by a film or or radio documentary about things like programs where inmates learn and perform shakespearean plays. they are *amazing* programs that make incredible, profound impacts on the men’s lives (i have not seen one documented for women, though they must be out there). the stories are at once heartening and heartbreaking, since i know programs like these can only help so many, and they are still running around playing catch-up to the problem.
a bit like putting a band-aid on a severed limb in one sense.
we simultaneously need more programs like these, a shift in cultural mind-set from penalization to rehabilitation, and massive, country-wide (really, world-wide) focus on the very thing eric mentions: understanding that we need to heal personally to heal collectively, but also that “if we need to stand up to the elements, if we need to make buildings to stay warm and dry, we simply must recognize that collective necessities have everything in common with individual necessities.”
gary:
The spike, in a simple sentence, is the rate of return on the lack of social investment starting with Reagan and exacerbated in the 1990s with Gingrich’s Contract on America.
Simple formula: Dismantle the social safety net. Create a tiered sentencing structure that targets the poor. Demonize the poor and reform (cut back) welfare. Cut school programs. Tear away at resources that equalize opportunity. You know the drill.
The net effect was that poor people, specifically poor women, are the fastest growing population in jail. Predominately black and Hispanic. And for all, the reduction in funding for public education, especially in areas where populations are most at-risk — aka poor urban neighborhoods and rural communities, you can be assured that a majority of students are penitentiary bound by fourth grade.
I’ve written before that the battle to eliminate the social safety net we fought for and won in the 60s and 70s, including Medicare, the environmental movement, Civil Rights and Women’s Rights was started in the mid-70s after Nixon was impeached. It has not stopped. In fact it’s gone global. The aim is not to just roll back the gains made for civil, worker and women’s rights. It’s to erase them completely from our cultural memory.
that spike in the prisons is really disturbing
the current US incarceration rate is just slightly lower than the Soviet Union’s levels before World War II when the USSR’s population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag system’s prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 800 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States