What you may notice, whether you live here or not, is that the murders are happening in the same parts of the city (and everybody has an idea how to fix the problem.) Just 2 weeks ago a man was car jacked at a gas station, shot and killed, in broad daylight, DIRECTLY ACROSS from the house where the ‘perps' lived (http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=583126). What were they going to do, drive the car across the street and park it in the garage? Unfortunately, the person who died was not a gang member, murderer, pedophile, or cigarette smoker, he was just a innocent family man with children. He was a Big Brother for many underprivileged kids and he owned rental properties in the area he was getting gas at. While pumping his gas, he refused to do what most of us would and give up the car, but instead took a stand and tried to get the weapon from the kids who were trying to rob him. He's dead; they're in jail.

How many lives were ruined in that thirty seconds? Anyway, most of these local murders are black on black, and involve people that are below the poverty line, or unemployed. What does this suggest? Black people shoot more? It's a black problem? Not really; I believe it is a direct result of too may decades of poverty.

As I said before, everyone has some answer. In the time article (which has our population wrong) they suggest fewer police on the street, the slow response time of 911, and finally near the end of the article, a lack of employment.

From the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinal article: "Finally, here is the tough medicine - getting the kids out of pathologically destructive "homes." It means taking a long, hard look at negligence and child custody laws. It means a hard examination of foster homes and revisiting the notion of orphanages and adoption. Somewhere, something like reform school enters the picture. All hard and serious stuff, hard on our liberal sensibilities. But it is a matter of life and death. We have abandoned the hard rules of marriage and family. We have our non-judgmental no-fault divorces, bless the unwedded mom, Band-Aid our fractured families and hope for the best. Ultimately, the urban homicide rate reflects the breakdown of families. "

Well put, however it leaves out one thing that has been kicking around in my head for quite some time: since the 1970s, our government has been selling our country out to the rest of the world for a profit. They allowed major corporation to ship labor across our borders so that they could line there pockets with more money. They allowed other countries to buy our land. Companies such as Wal-Mart sell products for less than realistic prices (and the products are crap) as they attempt to divert our attention of the loss of a liveable wage being available to the average American with a high school education by pointing to products that are 99 cents and saying, "See, our economy is good, look at how cheap everything is? Now buy more shit and we will all be better off."

Yea, know what else would help our struggling economy and social structure? Keep our American corporations here. Make PUBLIC education as important as college education, and make high schools as well equipped as private schools and colleges. Start teaching people to use condoms and stop already with the abstinence education with religious undertones. Prosecute people who bomb Planned Parenthoods and the like with the ferocity that you attack people who smoke pot. Push schools to teach that wanting and having sex is natural, but having and raising a child is a job for two people for at least 16 years (not three years or 5 weeks,) not a single mom who feels her options are limited by the surrounding area's religious insecurity.

Stop lying to us about the economy, trying to convince people that whatever corporate agenda is filling the current administration's pockets is the ‘new plan' for the rest of the country. Give people real options for their existence and real neighborhoods to grow up in. This country might have been a business since its inception, however, it was built on backs of SMALL business owners (people who dreamed of better) and their laborers, not mutli-million dollar national and global corporations that take every opportunity to squash the financial earning potential of the average person (along with there spirit; yes I am aware of labor laws, unions, and how little men stepped on even littler men, and the natives, in the past.)

Realize that your racism affected the already poor, struggling, black people in this country, and your loss of interest in keeping this country and our money, sound and secure has transcended to the rest of the country as well. Being poor and desperate is not a condition of race or neighborhood alone; it comes from an inner feeling of despair and frustration. A few decades of that compounded with ever-increasing prices for everything (except Wal-Mart items and 99 cent value meals) made in and sold in America makes for a powder keg of violence. A few more generations of contemporary American society in our current condition and we'll producing American suicide bombers.

Why are we in Iraq? I always believed we should either plant the flag in Baghdad or get the fuck out, because it's not our business. The main reason for the occupation is not liberation, or the securing of oil, it's so that corporations like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Chili's paying people shit wages can start siphoning off the money in that part of the world because the average American can't afford shit anymore because there is little employment opportunity.

So now companies can suck dry other parts of the world that haven't had the privilege of learning about capitalism, only to find out that it is now only an exclusive club for the already-rich. Small business and the American dream have dissipated to the point of being almost non-existant. The immoral corporate rape and trade in this country is a HUGE contributor to the weakening (and near destruction) of the family unit here in Milwaukee, and the rest of the United States. It is that greed that transcends to two young black men, without parents, without motivation for anything positive in their future, and with two previous generations of poor examples, to think that such a heinous crime as killing a man for his veichle across from their residence in broad daylight is an acceptable action to take as a way of financial gain. It's entirely nonsensical.

So Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, the other Bush, Dick Cheney, and all your minions and subsidiaries:

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING WHORES.

Way to lead by example. Go team America, congratulations, and welcome to Milwaukee, baby.

D-