[kearnyirish2]

“Young people who feel like they can do anything to anybody and get away with it.”

While these racially-motivated attacks are the result of decades of preaching racial hatred, I think there is also a larger unseen force at work here: young people today of all races see no future for themselves. I can’t believe how many young people in our local paper are getting arrested for DWI and drugs; we always had that stuff around when we were younger, but the sheer volume of arrests now is disturbing.

You’d be shocked at how little these young people are earning today (if they are fortunate enough to find work).

[Netz]

This may be true but what violent crime rampant during the Great Depression when young people worked their butt's off for a few dollars a week? Is a bad economy the reason for wanton violent crime? As the story said, the victim was not robbed just beaten. That is like a scene out of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Maybe incomes and prospects are bad but the sheer random nature of violent crime is getting worse and worse and whet needs to be done is enforcement and some serious penalties like the days of old with “20 years hard labor at Sing Sing”. Let ‘em split boulders for 20 years...all that has happened in the last 40 years is a feeling that you can get away with it in the courts.

[palmer]

young people today of all races see no future for themselves. I can't believe how many young people in our local paper are getting arrested for DWI and drugs

I can't believe how many are not in the paper. Where I live in rural Virginia the majority of kids "smoke". They are learning from pot legalization in other states, the cops don't care, and they are never in the paper.

[OldPossum]

Re post 16, you’re breaking my heart.