Posted on 09/01/2005 10:22:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly 10 times the national average," reported the Associated Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers conducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood on a random afternoon "no one called to report the gunfire," reported AP.
New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and lawlessness were running through the city long before this week, and they were bound to come to the surface under the pressure of natural disaster and explode in a scene of looting and mayhem.
Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.
Criminals dominate their neighborhoods to the point that people don't even call in crimes. The district attorney's office, tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens live in fear, has taken the "unusual" step of establishing a local witness protection program to encourage the reporting of crime, reports AP.
According to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors.
Meanwhile, cops, when they can get away with it, have been living out of town. It is far too scary for them and their families. New Orleans Police officers are required to live in the city but many ignore this residency requirement, according to the Times-Picayune. The paper discovered that many top-ranking New Orleands cops lived in the suburbs and that most cops, both black and white, wanted the residency requirement rescinded.
For reasons of political correctness -- critics of law enforcement say lifting the residency requirement will mean more white cops eager to brutalize residents of the inner city and fewer black cops understanding of them -- the residency requirement remains, though cops breaking the rule told the Times-Picayune that it seriously hurts recruitment. It also -- this is particularly evident in Los Angeles where cops involved in the Ramparts scandal turned out to be ex-criminals -- distorts recruitment.
If the New Orleans Police Department has appeared feeble during the chaos -- and in some cases complicit in it -- policies like the residency requirement explain the breakdown. (Perhaps another factor that has rendered the NOPD feckless in the face of a rising murder rate is the criticism of its handling of a minority Mardi Gras.) Americans who have seen cops join in the looting ask: Why are police officers behaving like criminals? Well, because PC police departments like the NOPD hire them. Aggressive, let's-just-meet-the-quota-style affirmative action has become the door through which criminals enter the police academy.
More than the physical foundations of New Orleans will need to be rebuilt over the next few years. Its politically correct culture in which pathologies are allowed to fester in the name of "progress" forms much of the debris that must be cleared away if civilization is to return to New Orleans. A city which boasts as one of its businesses memorial "death t-shirts" -- clothing made popular by the frequency of gangland slayings in New Orleans that say things like, "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa" -- was headed for collapse even without a hurricane, and had become, as the exodus of cops illustrates, unlivable.
Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued into silence whenever they tell the truth about this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But they are the ones who must lead the city now, and the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing to help the black underclass should step aside. Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational collapse they have long tried to conceal.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
Have you been to Detroit lately? All big cities in America have been turning into virtual mini third world countries for years now.
Why are they not in a position to benefit from work? Are they paid in some different currency from everyone else?
Why are they not in a position to benefit from Pell Grants and other government loans for school? I was unaware that only certain poor people were allowed to apply.
Why would they not benefit from affirmative action? Are they a different race of black people not eligible for AA?
This makes no sense.
He is not talking about the success of a few people in Harlem in the 1920's, until the 1950's most blacks lived under laws that set out to keep them separate from mainstream society. Segregation's goal was to keep blacks from assimilating with mainstream society. Blacks have not been welcome to assimilate with the rest of America until 50 years ago. Some still choose to live outside the mainstream, and they are ones who are causing all of the problems.
"What you see in N.O. is animal mentality that's been coddled by liberalism as an acceptable way to behave. That attitude killed N.O. There was no crime spree after 9/11 in NY. There was no looting with the great blackout that crippled much of the east coast. Those areas, yes, infested with liberalism, were not dominated by it, and therefore society could function during their crises."
That's the crux of it..and well worth repeating.
So what. Assimilation was no panacea(only a liberal would think that). Plenty of immigrants lived in unassimilated neighborhoods growing up and achieved success. Segregation does not equal failure. Thomas Sowell has written extensively on how much better African-Americans were doing scholastically prior to forced integration.
These people have been on the welfare dole for generations- breaking the mentality takes time and effort. A single mother in the NOLA projects who is about age 16, with a kid or two of her own and who has spent her whole life on welfare likely has a mother about 32 and a grandmother about 48, who have both spent their entire lives on welfare as well. Her father and father of her child are likely in and out of jail until they are put away for life or get killed. Marriage is a strange concept- no one she knows has every been married. Only a few people she knows have even graduated from high school, and she probably knows no one with a college degree. Few people in her life work or have any skills. She likely has never been beyond several blocks of her project, and the only white people she knows are cops or social workers.
There are thousands of people like her in every ghetto in America. A learned helplessness sets in, and they do not know how to save themselves. This is the horrifying legacy of welfare and other government programs, and it should make any decent person sick and angry.
Armpit? I would call it the "Sphincter of America during a severe bout of dysentery."
The HUD Secretary is quoted in my paper today saying that ONE BILLION DOLLARS worth of public housing in New Orleans has been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Get your arms around that. A billion dollars! And these are small, cheap, basic apartments, not luxury homes. It takes a lot of those to be worth a billion dollars. I've toured the projects in New Orleans and they go on for blocks and blocks. That's the population we are dealing with now.
I grew up in a white working class neighborhood in NYC under much, much better conditions.
But in my neighborhood, 90% of kids never go to college and those that do, go to a lower-tier one a few minutes drive from home. Most of these guys go into the building trades or get government jobs, live in their parents' basement apartment, live from paycheck to paycheck and spend all their time and spare cash tricking out their cars. A lot of them have illegitimate kids and they seem to just be waiting for their folks to die so they can inherit the house. Meanwhile they spend all their spare time drinking beers, smoking weed and watching sports or playing videogames.
It's not a tough life, but it lacks all ambition, all upward mobility, all self-improvement.
Yet even though conditions there were much more tolerable and therefore harder to leave, and even though the government gives me absolutely zero incentive to rise above it, I worked hard to get an academic scholarship to a top-quality private high school, I worked hard to get into a top college and unlike 99% of the people I went to grammar school with I own my own home, I have a job with tons of upward mobility and opportunity.
If I lived in a nasty neighborhood and there were free programs designed to give me a way out, I would jump at the chance to avail myself of scholarship opportunities, hiring programs tipped in my favor, etc.
I simply don't understand the mentality of people too lazy to even lift a finger to better their situation even though free means to improve are readily available.
There is a big difference in choosing to live in a neighborhood with others with a similar background and being forced to stay within a restricted neighborhood, be forced to using separate bathrooms and water fountains lest you "contaminate" decent white people, and even be prohibited from voting. White immigrants may have lived in ethnic communities for the first generation or so, but society at large made it their business to assimilate them into mainstream culture, and by the third or fourth generation people by and large moved outside of those communities to better neighborhoods with a mix of ethnicities. All Italian, or all Irish communities are a rarity today outside the Northeast or some large cities. Most of those descendants of the original immigrants see themselves as just plain white people, or just plain Americans. This was called the Melting Pot, and it was for white ethnics but not for blacks.
Assimilation is important to the point where everyone living here feels invested in America and its ideals. Without assimilation, where some people are made to feel that they are not true Americans, or that they merely "guests" of this country, when the chips are down people will not come to each other's aid. Without a common culture, there is nothing it for you or I to protect this country, or to maintain its values or system of government.
You did, my father who was born of wedlock and grew up in very bad neighborhood in Cleveland did, but by definition most of the people don't. Few people swim against the current, whether they grew up in a good neighborhood and family, or a bad one. I grew up in a good neighborhood and a family which valued education, and I did what everyone else around me did- followed the law, did well in school, went to college, started a career, became a contributor to society.
I don't quite buy that. This kind of thing didn't happen much in Black America before 1965 or so - there was poverty, certainly, but also a strong Christian ethic and very little of this kind of Third World behavior. The actions we are seeing are a direct result of welfare state liberalism and paternalistic Democrat racism. After 40 years of "the soft bigotry of low expectations", people start living down to them.
Who is causing some of those deaths? The crooks with guns. They all should be shot.
OK, I'm dehydrated, starving, fricking miserable.....well I'll just steal a LCD TV and watch a Dasani commercial (I don't know where the Hades I'm gonna plug it into THERE'S NO FRICKIN' ELECTRICITY!) and that'll alleviate my dehydration! Maybe I'll steal some DVDs about food and that'll take care of my starvation!
STFU idiot
You just don't get it, do you? You've been refuted dozens of times on this thread, the truth is as plain as the nose on your face.
Get lost, OK?
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