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Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Violence Videos Spur Bad Politics
By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services
Americans are shocked by youth violence again. What a difference
videos make.
The fatal beating of a teen on the South Side of Chicago shocks the world, as it should. Yet the larger tragedy is how little this death differs from other kid-on-kid violence, except that it was caught on video.
We easily become benumbed after years of tragic headlines about youth violence. Then we get jerked alert by horrific video images like the fatal gang-style beating 16-year-old Derrion Albert, an honor-roll student at Fenger High School.
In our horror it is natural for us to look for someone to blame besides the suspects that police have rounded up with the help of the video that the Internet beams around the planet.
It just happens to be the bad fortune of President Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley that this tragedy coincides with their efforts to woo the International Olympic Committee, which decides on Oct. 2 whether Chicago will beat out Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid to host the 2016 Olympics.
As Richard Nixon once said of presidential campaigns, there are no silver medals in this race. The competition for the games is intense, and so is Chicago's opposition. Chicagoans were about evenly split on hosting the games in a recent Chicago Tribune poll.
The Internet crackles with critics of the Olympics, Daley or Obama, or all three. Some raise the death of Derrion Albert and other young victims of local school or street violence to argue Chicago might be too unsafe, too corrupt or too indifferent to the plight of its poor to host the Olympics.
Unsafe? Compared to whom? Rio?
Here's an Associated Press account of life in Rio during a week in early September: A police shootout "stopped a commuter train and sent passengers fleeing for cover." Officers conducted a drug raid on a slum, "keeping 2,000 children out of school." Police gun battles "killed more than a dozen suspected traffickers." Yet that was the same week that the IOC released a report that gave high praise to Rio's bid for the 2016 Games.
The sad fact is that most of the violence that plagues great metropolises like Rio or Chicago occurs in parts of town to which tourists do not usually go. Tragically this makes the pain of poverty and violence too easily ignored by those who could do something about it. Yet video and the Web have the power to break down the emotional walls that separate communities from one another, even when they transmit a misleading message.
For example, those who are moved by video to judge Chicago's livability are no more ridiculous than Rush Limbaugh's recent rant after Matt Drudge's Drudge Report Web site posted another video of youth violence: a school bus security camera in downstate Illinois captured a black kid pounding on a white kid in the next seat.
Police reported, but then discounted the possibility that the incident was a hate crime. But Rush was not deterred by a mere lack of evidence. "Greetings, my friends. It's Obama's America, is it not?" he bellowed. "Obama's America -- white kids getting beat up on school buses now. I mean, you put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yeah, right on, right on, right on!' "
Note to Rush: Most black youths have not exclaimed "Right on!" since the days when you and I were young.
The truth is that race has little to do with youth violence compared to the impact of poverty and disconnection from hope. There is good news happening in some violence-plagued neighborhoods, even if it occurs too quietly to get as much media attention as the violence does.
One leading example of a neighborhood-based solution is the "violence-free zones" that police and school officials in Milwaukee, Baltimore, Atlanta, Dallas and Richmond have organized with assistance from the Washington-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.
"The Chicago tragedy is part of a plague sweeping the country," said Robert Woodson, the center's founder and president. "Kids are targeted not for being in a gang but for coming from a different neighborhood."
The key to a "violence-free zone," as Woodson explains it, is adult "youth advisors" with enough local connections and street savvy to win the trust of teens, yet also pass rigorous criminal background checks.
Effective "advisors" build enough trust to serve as "antibodies" in a toxic atmosphere, so kids will alert them to looming troubles without fear of being stigmatized as "snitching."
That makes sense. Before we waste our breath spouting off about what our kids need, we should listen to what the kids can tell us.
========
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.
(c) 2008 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
This news arrived on: 09/30/2009
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Posted Comments:
10-02-2009 14:46
JCE wrote:
Kids are the result of the parents, and the environment. Children learn what they live. Many parents, rich and poor, of all colors or religions,do a fine job. Many more, do a terrible job. Kids will do as expected. But if you put a child in a bad environment, and let others do the raising, the results will be terrible. Too many parents don't care. A result of too many people. Another reason to close the borders, keep abortion legal, and anything else we can do to morally and safely decrease not only the population, but increase the role of people in parenting, education, and government. How are we going to get free adults to wise up?
10-02-2009 13:26
xx wrote:
vivious teens
What got me was the response of the mother of the one who struck the first blow with the rail road tie. She just kept saying, they are gang bangers, they all do it. She seemed to think it was police brutality to have her son locked up for routine gang activity. I will point out that when we had the draft we did not lock up so many of these brats. The judge just gave them a choice of jail or finding a recruiting officer that would take them. They had no idea that jail was far easier. At any rate, then they were the DI's problem. And if they did not cooperate with the program, the whole barracks got punished so the other grunts would "straighten" them out. They would then learn first hand about vicious beatings. It made the world of difference to these useless humans. It actually turned some of them into good citizens. And it emptied the school of monsters and the jails of new meat for us to support.
10-02-2009 12:43
Renee wrote:
Ugh on the Olympics and Chicago
Obama took all of his Chicago cronies with him to the Whitehouse. Those, and the ones he left behind, all convinced him to drop everything (the STILL failing economy, record unemployment, two wars, etc, etc.) to fly over there (two separate planes leaving their giant carbon footprint). SO, drop all important issues so that his "buddies" could possibly sell off all their now value-lost real estate to the Olympic Committee because surely an Olympic village would have to be built. And oh-my-gosh they could become part of the filthy rich that the Demos so hate.
This news just in - the Olympic Committee ditched the Obama bid in the first round of voting.
So alllll that for the gains of a few and NO GAINS.
I wonder if the President, running around the world telling everyone how bad the U.S is/has been, had anything to do with the Committee's decision ????
This news just in - the Olympic Committee ditched the Obama bid in the first round of voting.
So alllll that for the gains of a few and NO GAINS.
I wonder if the President, running around the world telling everyone how bad the U.S is/has been, had anything to do with the Committee's decision ????
10-02-2009 07:44
JDB wrote:
Bad politics
Nothing new here. Generationally the same old stuff. (Remember the ethnic gang wars of the 50's).
The average or below average have always thought the intelligent were a bit odd. If not revering them, they disdained their academic success. Some of the super intelligent tended towards eccentricity and were, therefore, chided or mocked out in out-of-hearing-range conversations. It is sad to think that promise is snuffed out by persons whose only hope is incarceration in some detention facility. The audacity to excel is out of step with the ghetto mainstream. Being challenged by the content of books or the high of intoxicating drugs should not be a liability for any child. The principle role of government is law enforcement and we need to get back to that principle. It starts at the borders. People have their limitations.
The average or below average have always thought the intelligent were a bit odd. If not revering them, they disdained their academic success. Some of the super intelligent tended towards eccentricity and were, therefore, chided or mocked out in out-of-hearing-range conversations. It is sad to think that promise is snuffed out by persons whose only hope is incarceration in some detention facility. The audacity to excel is out of step with the ghetto mainstream. Being challenged by the content of books or the high of intoxicating drugs should not be a liability for any child. The principle role of government is law enforcement and we need to get back to that principle. It starts at the borders. People have their limitations.
10-02-2009 05:04
Parent wrote:
Chicago - Troubles
I am convinced that the problem with the youth today is that in too many cases, parents really don't care, they can come, go, and do whatever they want as long as they stay out of the parents hair!! All the youth really reach for is love, they have a right to family and love and too many are not getting the essense of family or love. I have heard people when asked where they live reply, I stay on Broadway. Why do they stay, because they know they aren't really living, it is just one more stop over till the rent is due and till they can get out of the mess called home - but a true home with love it is not. Sadly, we can't force, legislate, or train people who have no interest in learning/changing, it is why youth have no hope in too many cases. Parents don't really want them or care what they do.
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