PrintOctober 2, 2009
Youth violence in Chicago
According to a report by Katherine Skiba in the Chicago Tribune, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder are flying to Chicago at the request (order?) of the supreme community organizer himself, President Barack Obama (D). Announced on the eve of Obama's trip to Copenhagen to plead before the International Olympic Committee to "pretty please" choose my corrupt, broke and violence torn city for the 2016 Olympics, this dynamic duo will meet with school officials, students and residents to discuss what?
Gibbs has indicated that the administration was preparing an initiative to address the national issues of youth crime and gang violence.
After all, the IOC can deal with broke and corrupt cities, but violence against their athletes? Aside from the Arab slaughter of the Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, that is.
But Arne Duncan, despite lack of a professional educational background, was superintendent of Chicago schools for seven years before Obama appointed him as superintendent of our nation's schools, where he produced a national lesson plan for teachers to discuss how the nation's students can help the president fulfill his goals. As result, Duncan can't follow the example of his boss and blame the predecessor of the present Chicago superintendent, himself, for youthful violence in the city. Or the ongoing corruption in obtaining a place in Chicago's magnet schools. Or the continuing drop out rate.
And what Duncan and Holder, along with Obama and all the other do gooders who tsk, tsk about youth violence, as exemplified by the teen ager beaten to death with a large pole by other teen agers, won't admit, at least publicly, is which demographic dominates "the national issues of youth crime and gang violence." Too politically incorrect.
While young people do commit the most crimes, either in or out of gangs, certain areas of the country are more severely impacted by the problem than others. And the problems do not originate with the schools--most of the beatings and the shootings take place outside the schools although of course the students bring their problems into the schools, dragging them down even further.
So an Obama initiative on youth crime, along with the flashy Duncan-Holder trip to Chicago, will be a grandiose but empty and meaningless tax consuming gesture. And the youths will continue killing themselves and others until the issues of family and communal breakdown, especially among certain populations, are honestly confronted. And honestly dealt with.
In the meantime, youth crime will continue. With or without the Olympics.
