Let's face it, like him or not, George Bush does not have a talent for speech. In his first term I saw a few interviews where he was caught without his speech writers or prompters, or he was ignoring his prompters, and oh boy, what a travesty.
I won't waste time quoting him; at some point even if you don't watch the news you must have gotten an e-mail with a Bush quote. By the end of his first term I figure enough people had told him, "Hey pal, DO NOT speak to anyone without a prep session."
I am starting to think that Milwaukee's mayor may have the same verbal malady. Let's take a look at what Tom Barret has said in relation to the violence.To be fair, he does not have the same grammer problems Bush does, but what comes out....
The ‘war' in Iraq has had me looking at some of the problems that have been happening in our city lately. With everything that has been going on there(the deaths, the raids on innocent peoples homes, the soldiers coming home and being permantely depressed and suicidal/homicidal, the torture, the amount of money that we are hemmoraging for an occupancy that no one believes is just, or helping), one would think it
possible that we could pull together here for the sake of the country. In case you missed my post on
gun deaths, we (Milwaukee) are number three in the nation for murders this year, and we are number one per-capita, so it seems that is not a working theory.
The city has the
big festival coming up soon, and nothing says bad press like a person from Illinois or Minnesota getting mugged and killed at the only annual event that keeps anyone remembering what state we are in. So the city people toyed with a few ideas on how to keep it safe this summer. The most absurd was the idea of posting National Guard at all the troubled spots. I can just see it now, a Private and a Sargent from Omaha standing on the corner a ghetto street with automatic weapons watching for someone to fuck up. That would have just been a deal-sealer in the "what's the quickest way we can start a riot" category.
So, our police chief, Nan Haggerty, the Milwaukee D.A., and the mayor decided that tripling the patrols in ‘troubled' areas from 8pm to 4am, for the duration of the summer, is the answer. In case you have not put it together, the majority of the murders have been black on black, have been in the ‘hood, and have had implications of drug relation. I don't suppose that my theory on
‘Drug Displacement' would interest the city at all.
I live just east of what is considered the ‘high risk' neighborhood. My neighborhood, in the last year, has seen a tripling in the amount of burglary, and violent crime, such as mugging and rapes. (This seems to correspond with a certain real estate and freeway reconstruction project that has been going on as of late...but that's another story)
Anyway, the problem I have with the mayor is this:
I now perceive you as an idiot, and I voted for you. The media is nice to you now, but it will not last forever.
See, I thought he was going to be a good ‘Man of the people'. Not afraid to impliment out-of-the-box solutions for the growing number of unemployed, the growing number of families that are little more than mothers who have kids " ‘round here somewhere." All he has achieved so far is backing a ban on smoking in all public buildings, even private businesses. Way to go. (The
big thanks on
that goes to the governor. Knob.) I have no doubt that Barret believes what he says, and that is part of the problem.
In a recent interview regarding how the new
WAVE initiative is going to help Milwaukee not have so many murders, he said,
"I don't understand the mentality of why someone gets into drug dealing and uses a gun."
Really? No shit! You come from a good home where you never had to go without food. You were raised in a neighborhood where if you forgot to lock your door, there was a good chance that all your possessions would be there when you got home later. Holy fuck, a common way to fix a problem is to have someone solve it who has experience with the issue. That's why banks and casinos hire criminals to help them design better anti-theft systems. Our mayor just admitted that he has no idea how 'these people' think. Don't think I condone or accept the violence, I just have an understanding of how it starts, and how it can grow. He's the mayor, shouldn't he be smarter than me? We have had a growing poverty problem for years; on his way
into office, shouldn't he have had a plan ready for the city to combat this? I was under the impression he did.
"The no-snitch rule equals more violence. There's absolutely no question. It is a huge mistake to follow any kind of no-snitch rule in this community."
Good lord did you just fall off a turnip truck? First of all, the ‘community' you are speaking about, the one in which you said you did not understand the mentality of, is poor. It is growing increasingly poor and desperate as of late, as unemployment, and underemployment grow.
Desperate people do desperate things(kind of like how the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is the best possible recruiting technique for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.) Why would you encourage these citizens to put their lives on the line to rat out someone that has nothing to do with them. It is a good way to get them killed. Yes, I know stray bullets get people killed also(we have a dead
child to prove that.) However, suggesting that all the residents of the neighborhood become snitches is your answer?
Whether or not a person is not 'snitching' on their neighbors for fear of retalliation, or just because they do not feel comfortable being a worm, I am sure of one thing. If the city really wanted them to do it, I'm sure some money would loosen their lips.
(I think I liked it a lot better before the government busted up the mob; a person knew that if they owed, they paid. A person knew that if they snitched, it may be the last thing they did. The Omerta is a religion for some...and if a little kid was killed by a stray buillet, someone paid.)
Anyway, you want to encourage us citizens to be spineless turncoats for the police department because you can't stop the violence on your own? Let's apply some logic...
Maybe you should try to create jobs that offer a living wage, or pass a local law that prohibits corporations from ruining a city by creating jobs then selling out to bigger corporations and/or moving the home plants without creating a reasonable severance package (Fuck you Pabst, Laddish, Allen Bradley, Miller, Harley, the list goes on...). Maybe you could offer tax initiatives to companies that would consider putting plants and offices here. Maybe you could get our freeways right so that a person can get in and out of the city without it being an hour ordeal (we only have 650,000 people, not three or four million.) If our roads were fixed, maybe then when a big company comes here and considers putting up an office, that would be one less thing that you had to try to hide from them. Maybe you could not make the act of acquiring a business permit, a building permit, occupancy, etc, such a long, drawn-out fuck-story, seeing as the weather is definitely not our city's selling point.
Maybe you could focus on a realistic plan to encourage people to form
families before they start having kids. Such as a high school ad campaign that doesn't have to be run by the church for approval. Try to fix the mentality of the people and the drugs and violence will follow. As human beings, are we not supposed to be
evolving, not going backward?
Also, don't believe for a second that cracking down on drug supply, or drug users, is going to encourage people to stop using. Using comes from within; anything over casual use is a sign of a broken person. No matter what you do it will continue, you have just succeeded in making it more expensive. I suppose you can throw
everyone in the city in jail(marijuana destroys peoples lives how?)... And cutting supply takes away money from the ghetto. Like it or not, a lot of people survive on the ‘trickle down' of the ‘dope game'. Until humanity no longer feels the need to use drugs, you are doing nothing but making it worse.
How about establishing a research center to develop and impliment the realistic, large scale use of alternative fuels? Start with a state funded program, without the help of the federal government, and make this city a pioneer in the industry. Put the plant right downtown. Hire scientists and laborers. The city could have a goal to be the first 'big city' in the country to run off alternative power exclusively by 2015(but then how would the utility companies get paid; alternative power is cheaper and more efficient, and the monthly bills would be a lot less...)
As I remember, I came from a neighborhood(and a time) where most people had two parents, and the only difference I see between
that neighborhood and the ones in question(or any urban area), is the fact that these hard-lined, drug-dealing, gang-banging, gun-toting, murder-perpin', robbery-committing adults, is that they were once KIDS without parents.
So often the media like to catapult the attempt at stifling the symptoms of crime and drugs. They like to jump on a bandwagon that will make good news. If an idea or initiative works, you get good press. If it does not, you get crucified. One cannot fix a problem such as this by going at the after effects, you need to fix the root cause. It is not a black problem, or even an 'area' problem, or whatever other type of label that one person, or the media, would thrust at it. It is a problem with how we are sociologically progressing. It is a problem of what we deem acceptable as a whole, and how we handle our weaknesses on a national, and local, level. It is a problem of the accecptance of losing family structure. The simplest common denominator is the lack of parenting. Couple this with poverty, Mr. Mayor, and you have the answer to , "...why someone gets into drug dealing and uses a gun."
Unfortunatelty I feel this citywide effort will turn into a lot harassment for ordinary people and is timed excellently with the peaking of the patriot act. What little liberty we have left can be stripped away under the guise of security. At some point, maybe police will get shot. That would be tragic, for then it will lead to an increase in the aggressiveness of the department, and more harassment for the common man. I guess often it is the case that people only care what the media says, so if we start looking good on the ‘T.V. News' and with statistics, maybe they will chill the fuck out. Really, when more civillians, and then police, and then more civillians get killed or beaten, who is winning what?
One last thing. Mayor Barret and police chief Haggerty(and you G.W), you may end up being responsible for more deaths this summer than there already would have been(now the violent offenders, dealers, hoods, etc. are feeling like they have a target already on their back; and as we have seen, desperate people do desperate things.) I spoke of parental guidance earlier and I assumed that you inferred that I meant personal responsibility is taught by good role models, such as it can be in a two-parent household. When so callously looking at the perpetrators of these crimes (and the people that don't snitch) maybe you should consider this:
Children often emulate what there parents do. This also goes for other role models in their lives. Seeing as we can speculate that many of these kids/kids turned adults have had no solid parental example, where would they get it from? I am speaking of the mentality that using violence to achieve financial gain, or using violence to resolve personal issues, is acceptable?
Do you think maybe it has anything to do with the way the United States acts in the Middle East? Go for the money, kill the opposition, and fuck ‘em all, God says it's the right thing to do.
It's time to lead by example.
