Posted on 04/15/2005 12:42:37 PM PDT by TheMole
Cage the monsters
Thursday, April 14th, 2005
Once again, with the same savage thrust that it always has, youth gang violence has erupted in murder and assault. On a Bronx subway platform, a 17-year-old student from DeWitt Clinton High School was murdered by a group of knuckleheads. That much is clear: the boy is dead; the murderers were knuckleheads.
At this point, however, we cannot so easily assume that these young men, who used machetes to express their barbaric limitations, are the victims of poverty, single-parent households, drink and drugs. All of those things might be in there somewhere, but actual victims are not the perpetrators of the crime. That is one of our backward intellectual conventions that has evolved out of psychological and sociological theory. Those who believe in individual choice are always told to be quiet because their ideas are so old-fashioned. They are told no one is stronger than the environment and the context.
Well, that is just a bit too bad because there is more than a small amount of proof that the majority of young people at the bottom do not commit the worst possible crimes, like murder, mutilation, torture and rape. Those who do are not in need of understanding; they need to be removed from our streets and housed away from society for as long as possible. If that is not done, then we impose on all the other young people in their neighborhoods an unnecessarily dangerous set of threats to their peace of mind. Those kids need to concentrate on learning what they can do to help them move up in the world. They do not need to be thinking about how to appease the monsters among them.
I know that there are those who do not believe that young murderers should be described as monsters if they are not white. Well, I think that is some garbage.
Anyone who knows his way around this town and has been on a number of its public school campuses can easily take the position that the violent young criminal is not the norm among black youth, Latin youth or Asian youth. Not only that, but such violent young people are despised by the overwhelming bulk of their fellow students, who know well how much pressure these thugs bring into the learning environment.
In the ongoing dehumanization of our young people that takes place in our popular entertainments, we should be continually reminded of how important it is to this nation's youth that we figure out how to express the vitality of goodness. And express it in terms that cannot be reduced to soppy greeting card slogans.
That is as much our trouble at this time as anything else. It is quite easy to elevate the thug because he seems, unlike the nerd or the bookworm, free of all conventions other than an appetite for vulgar displays of wealth and a paranoid sense of defensiveness that can break out in stabbings or shootings in order to express some simple-minded point of honor.
But there are plenty of signs right before us that make it quite clear how to best deal with our young people, who seem to almost universally share a love for learning and a desire to rise above the mediocre. Our job is to protect that fragile human quality until it can protect itself. In order to do that, we need to support the police and make sure that they do their jobs but do not go overboard. High quality public schools and high quality law enforcement of the sort that the NYPD seems ever better at offering are the only solutions I can see to those public menaces among our youth.
Machetes? Sounds like MS-13's modus. Another reason to fix our broken borders.
Fo shizzle.
"Machetes? Sounds like MS-13's modus. Another reason to fix our broken borders."
Maybe they had just watched the movie Hotel Rawanda.
That kind of talk is going to hurt their self-esteem.
"Machetes? Sounds like MS-13's modus. Another reason to fix our broken borders."
Are you nuts?!?! Who's going to do the all jobs that Americans won't do?!? /THICK Sarcasm
Do you have any links to the news story that prompted this opinion piece?
Sounds like MS-13....
Hey hey hey! Thoughts like that won't please the editorial staff.
Thanks!!
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