Justice for Trayvon??

[Dream59]

LOL. Of course there is a lack of opportunity. Which is why we have so little upward mobility and worse a shrinking middle class. Blaming others isn't the proper word here anyway and taints the conversation. It's not bad that we have Wal-Mart for example. All around society benefits from Wal-Mart and it's a good deal except for the fact that it drives a lot of other people out of work. Nor are nooks evil. They are incredible. However once they really get going how many book stores do you think will survive? How many print shops? How many warehouses of storage or jobs transporting the books and magazines around? It's not like the same system isn't already in place for movies, video games, news papers and magazines.

There is clearly a difference in the level of education you get in the inner city, suburbs and in "good" neighborhoods. Without the strong foundation you're not getting into college and very few people have the natural inteligence to teach themselves K-12 certainly not well enough to get into college on scholarships and certainly not enough to get yourself into high end colleges (which because of Alumni programs it turns out that if your parents went you can get in much easier. Again lack of opportunity.

If it's a bitch and three quarters to maintain your status quo you're doing something wrong. Btw.

And it was proven that just having a black name lowers your chances of getting hired. While I can get right there (hell I often joke that blacks need to have their children named for them then returned) that some of the crazy names needs to stop and should never have started in the first fucking place. Mostly the made up crazy names. Being named Jamil should not mean getting hired after Chris if at all.

It doesn't help anything that the number of well of blacks is relatively small, especially once you eliminate various entertainers and the such. The myth of pulling yourself up by your boot straps is just that. A myth with a few exceptions to prove the rule. Most people get some help at some stages whether it was Dad hiring you into the company or putting you through college or a friend who made some phone calls and got you into a situation you likely couldn't accomplish on your own or simply being in a place where opportunities are simply plentiful because the enviroment is right.

Another factor is the attempts at welfare reform that while well meaning had disastrous results. It turns out refusing to give able bodied men welfare simply resulted in men leaving their familes so their "wives" and children could get the assistance they so desparately needed. Which in turn lead to single parent familes so on and so forth. And that most definitely was something DONE to them.

It's true that them could equally be applied to anybody sufficiently poor and it should be. However for whatever reason I don't know if it's ignorance, racism, radical optimism or habit but poor whites fundamentally think that even though nobody in their family has ever accomplished it that they are going to become Bill Gates. For whatever reason they do not want the tools to be made more readily available to them to pull themselves up. We should be pushing for better education in this country across the board. We have a whole lot of things that need to be honestly and openly discussed in this country about where we're going and how we intend to get there and that conversation effectively cannot start until we start being honest. The rich are not evil except for a select few. Nor are they benevolent they are just people who are acting in their own best interests (sorta but that's kinda beside the point.) Corporations are not evil. Not any more evil than any other tool is they can be used for evil purposes but they are not inherently evil in and off themselves. This is one place that the Right excells is at setting the narrative with these emotional words.

This is a reasoned response but I disagree with a lot of it. There is opportuinty in this country. If you own a book store and a huge chain moves in then become a used book store. The profits are higher and you get a much better read group of customers than a book store that just sells new books. In other words don't whine, find your niche and compete. Make your own opportunity.

My wife has taught in an inner city school system for 28 years. It isn't that educational opportuities are not there. They may not have all the programs of the richer school systems, but if you get right down to it, if you put your effort into learning the subject matter well, you can score well enough to get into most colleges. Instead of blaming the school systems, blame the huge drop out rate. The parents of most of these kids have no desire to excell and do not demand better from their kids. The kids drop out and turn to crime and the parents don't do anything about it. Going to prison is not a road block in the culture it makes you a hero in the neighborhood. There are more than enough minority programs that will get kids into college if they have made a true effort in high school, even if their grades are borderline. Fix the drop out rate and demand excellence and then if there are still problems then I might listen to "lack of opportunity".

Do not blame single parent homes on welfare. This is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed with something more than rhetoric. The welfare system does nothing but take the will to strive for excellence from people. After Katrina there was a news story of several ladies in their 70s and 80s that were lamenting the fact that their housing project was not going to be reopened, they talked about how unfair it was. They stated the projects were the only place they had ever lived. One lady had lived in the same free apartment for her entire life. This is not what welfare should be about, it should be about giving a helping hand, not a lifestyle or something that should last for life. As for single parent homes, this is one of the most devestating problems for the community. There has to be a stigma attached to have a child, or more than one, before you gruduate high school. How can you get an education and pull yourself up if you have 1 or more kids before you get out of school. Having multiple kids with multiple fathers does not teach kids to have respect for the family unit or to have respect for themselves.

As you said these problems cross all boundries, but until each group fixes their own problems, or at least makes as much of an effort to to place blame on themselves as they do to blame others, then it will never be fixed and few and fewer people are going to listen.

 

[Ishmael]

He won't walk with a forced [unintelligible].

He could walk with a nolle prosequi, however.

You do the Latin and I'll do the 'fun with phonics.'

Ishmael

 

[Ishmael]

What case?

Good point, and there's unlikely to be one as more and more facts come to light.

Ishmael

 

[Sean Renaud]

This is a reasoned response but I disagree with a lot of it. There is opportuinty in this country. If you own a book store and a huge chain moves in then become a used book store. The profits are higher and you get a much better read group of customers than a book store that just sells new books. In other words don't whine, find your niche and compete. Make your own opportunity.

My wife has taught in an inner city school system for 28 years. It isn't that educational opportuities are not there. They may not have all the programs of the richer school systems, but if you get right down to it, if you put your effort into learning the subject matter well, you can score well enough to get into most colleges. Instead of blaming the school systems, blame the huge drop out rate. The parents of most of these kids have no desire to excell and do not demand better from their kids. The kids drop out and turn to crime and the parents don't do anything about it. Going to prison is not a road block in the culture it makes you a hero in the neighborhood. There are more than enough minority programs that will get kids into college if they have made a true effort in high school, even if their grades are borderline. Fix the drop out rate and demand excellence and then if there are still problems then I might listen to "lack of opportunity".

Do not blame single parent homes on welfare. This is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed with something more than rhetoric. The welfare system does nothing but take the will to strive for excellence from people. After Katrina there was a news story of several ladies in their 70s and 80s that were lamenting the fact that their housing project was not going to be reopened, they talked about how unfair it was. They stated the projects were the only place they had ever lived. One lady had lived in the same free apartment for her entire life. This is not what welfare should be about, it should be about giving a helping hand, not a lifestyle or something that should last for life. As for single parent homes, this is one of the most devestating problems for the community. There has to be a stigma attached to have a child, or more than one, before you gruduate high school. How can you get an education and pull yourself up if you have 1 or more kids before you get out of school. Having multiple kids with multiple fathers does not teach kids to have respect for the family unit or to have respect for themselves.

As you said these problems cross all boundries, but until each group fixes their own problems, or at least makes as much of an effort to to place blame on themselves as they do to blame others, then it will never be fixed and few and fewer people are going to listen.

First your idea of starting a used book store is fully dependent on magic in order to work. Where do these books magically appear from? How do you get the money while your real business goes under? Besides you didn't even attempt to address my greater point which is the computer age. With Nooks and Kindles how long do you expect book stores large or small to exist? I'm talking about the sheer volume of jobs lost country (and eventually world) wide when all media transfers are done by computer? It's a lot more than you think and it's already happening. Just look at the big names that have gone under in the last few years. Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA just off the top of my head. Now remember not only did they have cashiers, they had stockers, managers, warehouses, truck drivers, security guards, janitors. I'm sure you can see where that road leads and it gets there VERY quickly.

The educational opportunities are not there. Just like you admited they don't have the other programs and we know enough about human development to know that music for example isn't meaningless. Those bells and whistles do in fact lead to smarter kids. So taking them away does inherently lower their chances. The rest of your argument on education specifically is true but it's true in that half bs way. It boils down, in your opinion, to hard work. At some point your simply asking to much of a person, especially when its possible to make things easier. Sure there is ice at the top of Mt Everest but I think it's a tad cruel to send some up there to fill up the cooler and keep their food from rotting. The kids in a lot of cases dont' have parents that were educated beyond high school and even if they were they've long since forgotten a lot of that stuff and can't help much. Again the number of people inteligent enough to teach themselves is rather low.

As for drop out rates it's not really the problem. That's a side effect that's caused (imho) on a number of things. First and most important a High School Diploma is a hair shy of useless. Most of the places that will hire you with JUST a HSD will hire you without one as well. It turns out that you don't need all that extra education to work in retail or frankly a lot of things. Two we've created an enviroment where being a criminal is actually more profitable than working at minimum wage. School is a lot of work when you can make more money with less work. Three because we spend so little on our schools (in the grand scheme of things) they aren't not only adequate but properly run. That's not even taking into account that we should be changing a lot of how we educate on basic level but that's for another day.

The single parent familes are squarely part of the welfare problem. There is no separating the two issues as one is largely responsible for the other. It's like claiming that fire can't be held responsible for cooking.

The hand up or hand out argument can go on forever. It's overlooking a few fundamental problems. We aren't going to let people go homeless and hungry. We simply aren't. (Particularly not in a country that pays farmers not to farm to keep food prices artificially high. Turns out farmings so simple that it's not profitable in a free market.) So we really have to options and for some reason we chose the more expensive one. We can feed them and shelter them. Or we can wait until they get sufficiently desprate do something stupid and then we can feed them and shelter them. While paying other people to make sure they don't leave and making it more difficult for them to get out of the need for help in the future. Unless those ladies were jobless their entire lives your missing the point entirely. That even with minimum wage it's not enough to live on and currently there are people arguing that we should eliminate minimum wage because it's driving unemployment up. If a person can't make it on 7.25 an hour how the fuck to you expect them to do it on 5.00 an hour? Magic? Simply supply and demand pretty much demands that wages would necessarily plummet without a minimum wage. Which loops back up to the why work when it's easier and more profitable to be a criminal and worst case scenario I get caught and I get fed. We have a problem and we've had it for a long time.

The first step is getting people to realize there all part of the same problem and no small part of that problem is the concentration of wealth. I think its safe to say that when employers are now asking people for their facebook passwords that we can safely say we've gotten to a point where the employers have a bit more power than they ought.

The second step is getting all those folks that think this isn't a problem to realize it kinda is. Then we have to rationally discuss what we're gonna do moving forward.

 

[Byron In Exile]

You do the Latin and I'll do the 'fun with phonics.'

Okay. But phonetically, it would be "NO-lay pro-SAY-quee."

 

[Ishmael]

Okay. But phonetically, it would be "NO-lay pro-SAY-quee."

In Latin. *chuckle*

Ishmael

 

[koalabear]

Let's leave my chronically under-achieving children out of this, m'kay?

 

[RightField]

What you point out is that there are still lots of issues with black America. I agree and think it's important to strengthen our nation's efforts at creating equal opportunity. While I think there is equal opportunity (as Dream pointed out, that a person with initiative can succeed even in disadvantaged schools), I also think that we, as a nation, should try to do more to give people the opportunity in "the pursuit of happiness" however they define it (which may include greater achievement or not).

You say that there's no opportunity. I disagree with that, however, finding and taking advantage of the opportunities is more difficult without a decent education, good social habits, a history of being dependable (previous employment) and a supportive community.

What do you recommend that we do about it?

As this debate about Trayvon continues to rage there are a lot of wounds being exposed. One side says it was strickly self-defense against a suspicious character and the other side says that the presence of a young black man shouldn't arouse suspicion and that suspicion is ample evidence of continued discrimination and that is what led to murder. A number of people, including Juan Williams, have cited the high incidence of young black males complicit in murder and other violent crime and others have cited the huge incidence of incarceration.

I think some of this is the result of the lack opportunity combined a bad set of cultural standards (anti-learning?, violence, etc) in some of these communities and probably some discrimination too. As I mentioned above, there is opportunity if a person is mentally, physically and emotionally ready to take advantage of it, but for many reasons, many people in this culture recoil from it.

I don't believe that pushing for "equal outcomes" is the answer.

It seems we almost have another lost generation of young black males. As a nation, we can't afford to keep losing all these young men...and I mean that on many levels. What can we do to improve our prospects for the next generation?

 

[RightField]

Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin
The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites..

April 4, 2012
Wall Street Journal

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a "hoodie," a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: "I will take you out!" There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon," said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family's side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, "There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement." And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon's parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth.

The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth. O.J. Simpson was innocent by the poetic truth that the justice system is stacked against blacks. Trayvon was a victim of racist stereotyping—though the shooter never mentioned his race until asked to do so.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.

When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.

And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon's sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the '60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

 

[unregistered]

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

This is a reasoned response but I disagree with a lot of it. There is opportuinty in this country. If you own a book store and a huge chain moves in then become a used book store. The profits are higher and you get a much better read group of customers than a book store that just sells new books. In other words don't whine, find your niche and compete. Make your own opportunity.

My wife has taught in an inner city school system for 28 years. It isn't that educational opportuities are not there. They may not have all the programs of the richer school systems, but if you get right down to it, if you put your effort into learning the subject matter well, you can score well enough to get into most colleges. Instead of blaming the school systems, blame the huge drop out rate. The parents of most of these kids have no desire to excell and do not demand better from their kids. The kids drop out and turn to crime and the parents don't do anything about it. Going to prison is not a road block in the culture it makes you a hero in the neighborhood. There are more than enough minority programs that will get kids into college if they have made a true effort in high school, even if their grades are borderline. Fix the drop out rate and demand excellence and then if there are still problems then I might listen to "lack of opportunity".

Do not blame single parent homes on welfare. This is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed with something more than rhetoric. The welfare system does nothing but take the will to strive for excellence from people. After Katrina there was a news story of several ladies in their 70s and 80s that were lamenting the fact that their housing project was not going to be reopened, they talked about how unfair it was. They stated the projects were the only place they had ever lived. One lady had lived in the same free apartment for her entire life. This is not what welfare should be about, it should be about giving a helping hand, not a lifestyle or something that should last for life. As for single parent homes, this is one of the most devestating problems for the community. There has to be a stigma attached to have a child, or more than one, before you gruduate high school. How can you get an education and pull yourself up if you have 1 or more kids before you get out of school. Having multiple kids with multiple fathers does not teach kids to have respect for the family unit or to have respect for themselves.

As you said these problems cross all boundries, but until each group fixes their own problems, or at least makes as much of an effort to to place blame on themselves as they do to blame others, then it will never be fixed and few and fewer people are going to listen.

There is a wealth of peer reviewed data that says you're dead wrong. These problems do not cross all boundaries and exist in one specific place. Poverty.

If you grow up poor you do not have the same opportunities to education as the middle class. Students who come from generational poverty start every school year behind their peers from middle class homes because they don't get exposed to the same vocabulary and they don't live in a print rich environment.

 

[bra_man69]

There is a wealth of peer reviewed data that says you're dead wrong. These problems do not cross all boundaries and exist in one specific place. Poverty.

If you grow up poor you do not have the same opportunities to education as the middle class. Students who come from generational poverty start every school year behind their peers from middle class homes because they don't get exposed to the same vocabulary and they don't live in a print rich environment.

There victims of there environment dam it.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

It seems we almost have another lost generation of young black males. As a nation, we can't afford to keep losing all these young men...and I mean that on many levels. What can we do to improve our prospects for the next generation?

Educate.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

There victims of there environment dam it.

Their environment.

 

[RoryN]

Their environment.

...and yet you forgot to correct "They're victims". Embarrassing.

 

[RightField]

Educate.

That's a relatively simple answer. It seems we've been trying that will all sorts of special attention to schools that are problematic and it hasn't been working. You also mentioned vocabulary and a "print-rich environment" as factors.

How would you fix that?

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

That's a relatively simple answer. It seems we've been trying that will all sorts of special attention to schools that are problematic and it hasn't been working. How would you fix that?

More training so teachers can teach the secret rules of the middle class to kids of poverty. More training so teachers have more strategies to deal with the kids who come from poverty.

Extend the school year to 200 days. Extend the length of the school day. Daycare for high school moms.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I predict we will become weary of the Negrofication of America, or embrace it and resign ourselves to 3rd World status.

 

[RightField]

More training so teachers can teach the secret rules of the middle class to kids of poverty. More training so teachers have more strategies to deal with the kids who come from poverty.

Extend the school year to 200 days. Extend the length of the school day. Daycare for high school moms.

I like the idea of extending the school year.

Shouldn't it be an entire community effort rather than simply putting the responsibility on the teachers?

 

[garbage can]

...and yet you forgot to correct "They're victims". Embarrassing.

*laughing*... A spelling nazi caught in his own snare.............

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

I like the idea of extending the school year.

Shouldn't it be an entire community effort rather than simply putting the responsibility on the teachers?

Sure, in theory. The reality is that doesn't work.

In an area stricken with generational poverty not many people have reading, writing, & math skills. Relationships are more valued than education. In an area stricken with generational poverty, a teacher might be the only person the kid comes into contact with who has been to college.

There's a ton of data out there linking how well a kid will do in school to the level of education their mother received.

If the community could fix this problem, they would have.

 

[Dream59]

First your idea of starting a used book store is fully dependent on magic in order to work. Where do these books magically appear from? How do you get the money while your real business goes under? Besides you didn't even attempt to address my greater point which is the computer age. With Nooks and Kindles how long do you expect book stores large or small to exist? I'm talking about the sheer volume of jobs lost country (and eventually world) wide when all media transfers are done by computer? It's a lot more than you think and it's already happening. Just look at the big names that have gone under in the last few years. Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA just off the top of my head. Now remember not only did they have cashiers, they had stockers, managers, warehouses, truck drivers, security guards, janitors. I'm sure you can see where that road leads and it gets there VERY quickly.

The educational opportunities are not there. Just like you admited they don't have the other programs and we know enough about human development to know that music for example isn't meaningless. Those bells and whistles do in fact lead to smarter kids. So taking them away does inherently lower their chances. The rest of your argument on education specifically is true but it's true in that half bs way. It boils down, in your opinion, to hard work. At some point your simply asking to much of a person, especially when its possible to make things easier. Sure there is ice at the top of Mt Everest but I think it's a tad cruel to send some up there to fill up the cooler and keep their food from rotting. The kids in a lot of cases dont' have parents that were educated beyond high school and even if they were they've long since forgotten a lot of that stuff and can't help much. Again the number of people inteligent enough to teach themselves is rather low.

As for drop out rates it's not really the problem. That's a side effect that's caused (imho) on a number of things. First and most important a High School Diploma is a hair shy of useless. Most of the places that will hire you with JUST a HSD will hire you without one as well. It turns out that you don't need all that extra education to work in retail or frankly a lot of things. Two we've created an enviroment where being a criminal is actually more profitable than working at minimum wage. School is a lot of work when you can make more money with less work. Three because we spend so little on our schools (in the grand scheme of things) they aren't not only adequate but properly run. That's not even taking into account that we should be changing a lot of how we educate on basic level but that's for another day.

The single parent familes are squarely part of the welfare problem. There is no separating the two issues as one is largely responsible for the other. It's like claiming that fire can't be held responsible for cooking.

The hand up or hand out argument can go on forever. It's overlooking a few fundamental problems. We aren't going to let people go homeless and hungry. We simply aren't. (Particularly not in a country that pays farmers not to farm to keep food prices artificially high. Turns out farmings so simple that it's not profitable in a free market.) So we really have to options and for some reason we chose the more expensive one. We can feed them and shelter them. Or we can wait until they get sufficiently desprate do something stupid and then we can feed them and shelter them. While paying other people to make sure they don't leave and making it more difficult for them to get out of the need for help in the future. Unless those ladies were jobless their entire lives your missing the point entirely. That even with minimum wage it's not enough to live on and currently there are people arguing that we should eliminate minimum wage because it's driving unemployment up. If a person can't make it on 7.25 an hour how the fuck to you expect them to do it on 5.00 an hour? Magic? Simply supply and demand pretty much demands that wages would necessarily plummet without a minimum wage. Which loops back up to the why work when it's easier and more profitable to be a criminal and worst case scenario I get caught and I get fed. We have a problem and we've had it for a long time.

The first step is getting people to realize there all part of the same problem and no small part of that problem is the concentration of wealth. I think its safe to say that when employers are now asking people for their facebook passwords that we can safely say we've gotten to a point where the employers have a bit more power than they ought.

The second step is getting all those folks that think this isn't a problem to realize it kinda is. Then we have to rationally discuss what we're gonna do moving forward.

Sean reading your words makes me feel your frustration, and I will agree with you that it is tough to get ahead in life, but I still disagree with alot of what you place the blame on.
You start a used book store by going on weekends to yard sale, estate sales, and buying online from venders that specialize in used books. You start this before you are broke. If you do not realize your business is in trouble, and that it is not making enough money to be self sustaining, then you are not a good enough business person to succeed anyway. As for Kindles and all the rest, there will always be a market for used books. People that wish to own used books for the most part will always want the book and not some electronic piece of plastic. They want them because, like me, they feel a book is a friend, and will be a friend even if left on a shelf and not visited for years. They want them for the value that a collected book holds. They want them for the prestige of having the book on their shelves. Like I said before, you find your niche and you compete. The large chains go out of business for many reasons. For some it is greed, they expand at a rate that the business can not sustain. For some it is not the business model that is bad but the customer service that brings it down. For some it is the economy, and for some it is because they did not COMPETE well with someone that provided all that they did not.

As for your comments about education. You said "Those bells and whistles do in fact lead to smarter kids" this is wrong. It might lead to a better rounded education but it has noting to do with how smart a kid is. You also miss the point about education. All education does not come from a classroom. The kids can go to the library and read about anything they wish to read about. I can visit any place on earth with a book. If you do not take music in highschool, then become an engineer, or a doctor, lawyer, anything but a highschool drop out. But you are right about one thing. That is that many of the parents are not educated and they do not insist on their kids doing better than they themselves did. They do not encourage and insist that their kids excell, they accept poor performance and then do as you are doing and say that their lives and the lives of their kids are hard because of racism and the lack of opportunity, when it is actually that they refused to reach for the opportunity and settled for failure. You also said "Two we've created an enviroment where being a criminal is actually more profitable than working at minimum wage. School is a lot of work when you can make more money with less work." Well I hate to say this but you are talking about a lack of morals. It is total bullshit to say well hell fuck going to school and getting an education, I'll make more as a criminal. hell You take most any profession and you can make more as a criminal, until you get arrested. Then what do you have? You have someone that did not try to do it the right way, they dropped out of school and made a great living for 5-10 years and now they are in prison for 20 and when they get out they are right back where they started. To your third point you are right that we do not spend enough on education. But a tax payer can also say that the opportunities that are there are not being made use of, why pay more.

I think you are wrong about welfare being the reason for single parent families. There again it is a cultual problem. It is not looked down on to have kids from multiple relationships. Nor is it looked down on to have a few kids before you turn 18. In my mind this too is a moral break down and you can't keep blaming it on other people or groups. As for the ladies I mention I do not know if they were jobless their entire lives. I do know that they lived in free housing their entire lives. Minimum wage is just that, minimum. That is where people should start and as they gain expertise and experience their pay rises. Minimum wage is not ment to be a good wage. Why would I pay someone with no education and no experience $50,000 a year to flip burgers. Get off the ole ass and work for what you want, strive, invent opportunity, do not wait for it to be given to you.

I agree that I will never give anyone my passwords to anything, but this is a small problem and is not a cause of anything. It sounds like you wish that everyone, reguardless of wether they earned it or not, get a free college education, all the money that they wish to have, and if they do not wish to work, they should be kept in the manner that wish to be kept. Your arguments have been around since the 60s and even with all the social programs that have been put into place since, and the almost complete lack of institutional racism, you want more, more, more. But the fact of the matter is that welfare and the social programs have themselves devestated minorities. Things are worse now in a lot of ways than they were in the 60s. Racism on an individual basis will never go away, no matter how much we try to police thought. But at some point things have to be earned and not given for them to be appreciated. If not we could give everyone $50,000 a year and they would be bitching because it was not enough. It would not be enough because they would see someone that earned $100,000 a year and say why can't I have that, without any idea the effort that went into making that $100,000 a year.

Yes folks need to see that there is a problem. But they need to look inward for most of the causes and stop blaming everyone else for them.

 

[RightField]

Sure, in theory. The reality is that doesn't work.

In an area stricken with generational poverty not many people have reading, writing, & math skills. Relationships are more valued than education. In an area stricken with generational poverty, a teacher might be the only person the kid comes into contact with who has been to college.

There's a ton of data out there linking how well a kid will do in school to the level of education their mother received.

If the community could fix this problem, they would have.

A lot of immigrants come here and they become parents and they don't necessarily have a lot of education, but they still push their kids to succeed and many do. There are also a lot of black kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds that do well...so it's a subset, not a whole.

I think parents/guardians have to be involved because the teacher can't be there at night telling the kid not to go out and to stay home and study and to reiterate how important it is to study and do well.

 

[Dream59]

There is a wealth of peer reviewed data that says you're dead wrong. These problems do not cross all boundaries and exist in one specific place. Poverty.

If you grow up poor you do not have the same opportunities to education as the middle class. Students who come from generational poverty start every school year behind their peers from middle class homes because they don't get exposed to the same vocabulary and they don't live in a print rich environment.

I was speaking of racial boundries, not social. It might be harder if you are poor but it is not impossible. My parents were extremely poor when I was born, but with hard work and education they made a decent middle class live for themselves and 3 kids. There will always be poor for whatever reason, wether bad breaks, lack of self disipline, lack of desire to excell, lack of health, among others. But each person can make the most of their opportunities or they can bitch that it is someone elses fault.

 

[Dream59]

Sure, in theory. The reality is that doesn't work.

In an area stricken with generational poverty not many people have reading, writing, & math skills. Relationships are more valued than education. In an area stricken with generational poverty, a teacher might be the only person the kid comes into contact with who has been to college.

There's a ton of data out there linking how well a kid will do in school to the level of education their mother received.

If the community could fix this problem, they would have.

There is a lot of truth in this. But I maintain that the answer is to demand that your kids do not settle for less. If you can not read demand that your child learn. Ask them what they are suspose to be doing, communicate with the teachers and see if your child is keeping up and if not don't let it slide.