No, it is correct that legalizing drugs won't make gangs go away. What it WILL make go away is this bogus mythology that drugs and gangs are somehow joined at the hip. They aren't. Greg Reinhardt said it quite correctly. Gangs are a sign that society is not meeting human needs. In this society, we seem to believe that as long as SOMEONE'S needs are being met, no one has any excuse to be in a gang. But that is one of our illusions. Any society you can name, no matter what its level of toxicity, is meeting SOMEONE'S needs. Really violent societies tend to be those with the highest number of people's needs not being met. We really try here to meet a larger percentage of needs, something that Pawlenty and his exurban support don't like. They cut the LGAs so that we would withdraw our support from the people they don't like. But the fact is that Minneapolis does not have a wall around it. People from every direction enter this city. And elsewhere in this society, there is very little desire to meet the needs of anyone but the very rich. And so we should expect to inherit some of the cost of that. So, you smug people who tell yourselves "I am not in a gang!", consider that that applies to most people. But think about some boy who can't walk anywhere without getting abused. What are we doing to prevent that? I'd say almost nothing. Eventually, the lure of "joing the gang and we'll revenge you" will have some attraction to that boy. He has a bad set of choices. The gang pounds him or everybody pounds him. What would your advice to that boy be? "Don't walk anywhere?" "Get an adult to deal with those boys"? What adult? And once you're in the gang, you don't get out alive. So, come on. Start problem-solving. And remember there is an inheritance principle here. It doesn't HAVE to start here, we can inherity it. If we abandon the boys of our society, as we do, we will inherit the gang members later on.
Taxi Murders
Someone get me up to speed. Why AREN'T there barriers between drivers and passengers? I drove once, and things were safer then. But if I was asked to drive today, I'd definitely require protection from passengers. And even then I doubt I'd visit any neighborhood where there was a murder. And one more question: Why would we need a protest to have cabbies driving the speed limit? Couldn't they just obey the law because that's a good thing?
School Reforms
I think it is careless to assume a causal relationship between Johnson's administration and trends in school achievement. That is an overdetermined result, so you have to analyze it that way.
________________________________________ Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood Longfellow Community Minneapolis, MN We think. You'll like it here. And we're more fun than a barrel of Norwegians
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