First off people bring up parenting all the time. It’s not that no one questions it, it’s that it cannot be proactively managed.

I’ve spoken to single professional mothers in the past and they absolutely, positively have to get past the issue that their child’s father is not in the picture. For community observers and leaders to continually bemoan the amount of single parents out there or the lack of involvement by fathers is just idiocy. That ship sailed in 1978 and it’s never going back. You can probably fix a future generation’s willingness to stay married, but you cannot change the lives of children today by suggesting that Dad take them bowling one more sunday afternoon. What needs to happen is for community organizations to address the issue knowing that the absentee fathers are not involved now and will not be involved in the future. Bemoaning that situation does nothing, but accepting that situation will not change so what do you do after you acknowledge it won’t change. Do you finance the boy scouts? Do you have a mandatory big brother program? Do you improve DCPS After-Care? Do you hold a meeting of church leaders to address it? Whatever needs to be done, needs to be done without pointing fingers at the absentee fathers on the street or in jail who hoist a finger in return.

But we both know what the real issue is. The issue is no different if you’re talking about Trinidad or Bed-Stuy or South Philly or a trailer park in West Virginia. My mother grew up in a rural area where her family was the only family to value education and everyone else got wrapped up in drinking/honky tonks/fighting, hunting/fixing their car/fixing their house or religion/politics/hatred. When she returned for her high school reunion she was the only person out of the entire class who put vegetables on her plate at the buffet. The only person out of 100 or so survivors. The love of crime and criminals is the problem. This community may not have the bad arteries of Apalacian culture, but they have the same disregard for education. They have the same love of guns.

I do not believe that this can be solved for good by the government, but I sure would like to see our community pay for advertising posters that shame people into going to graduate school or shame them into applying for a better college if they’re stuck in Strayer.

I would not doubt that a lot of this denial has to do with the prickly nature of criticising a certain group of people. The school issue showed you just how warped the thinking of some of our residents. The parents and a school board administrator (Lockridge) chastising Rhee because she should have never combined schools with warring “crews” speaks volumes to the level of dysfunction in this city.

Odentex, your last message advocates keeping our eye on the ball, while doing the exact opposite. How is gun control related to the current situation? Were there ever any guns involved?

Odentex is talking about guns because last week (or was it two weeks ago?) we had a lengthy discussion on this board where we talked about DC’s lax gun laws. It was a conversation that grew out of a recent community meeting on shootings in Petworth.

Since then, Oden and others have been trying to get folks to focus on trying to address gun issues. This recent dust up about this young man and his multiple arrests is an unrelated issue.

To Nate: I don’t understand why you are trying to make everyone else feel as hopeless as you do. Anytime anyone writes anything about crime, you’re right there to say is that the person should be put down like a dog because they aren’t even human; black people don’t have any sense and love crime; criminal’s parents are horrible and if it were you, you wouldn’t put up with it; or anything that we say or do or think in positive response won’t help because the entire world is going to hell because people won’t raise their kids right yadda yadda yadda ON AND ON. It’s the same thing, every single time.

I don’t mean to sound flip, I’m deadly serious: why are you such a downer? Why do you shoot down (heh) any and all suggestions that don’t involve giving up? What do you think that people should do if they don’t want to just vent on a message board, and carry a gun?

If you want to work for a concealed carry law in DC, go ahead, be my guest. But until that day I must insist that the best course is for everyone to FOLLOW THE LAW.

We have to start somewhere, and one obvious somewhere is the gun laws which cannot hold up to ANY scrutiny. Ultimately, why should kids have any respect for the law when the likes of Nate don’t either? How do we get Nate and some gun-toting children to obey the law? Make the price of poker too high.

Nate: You are so sure a change in the law can’t make any difference, eh? I bet I know of at least one person who won’t risk carrying a weapon illegally if he knew that he’d get a mandatory year in “I love my cellmate Nate” prison.

November 25th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
And of course the City Council will never deal with the legal basis for that because those young and predominantly african american men are their consituents and will wind up in jail. Not a way to earn votes eh? How long will folks put up with this stagnation?
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Technically, not many of these young men are voting. But their mothers and grandmothers vote. Flooding any of these neighborhoods with police in Wards 4,5,7,8 would be disaster for the black politicians. Many of these people do not trust police. It would only take a Sean Bell/Diallo type shooting to get one of these black politicians voted out of office. As it stands now, you hear very little grumbling from the blacks in the aforementioned wards about the killings. So why would Bowser, Barry, Thomas, Kwame, or Alexander do anything about it when most of their constituent concerns are about the basics: paying a utility bill or paying rent?

You are asking these members to respond to an issue that is a nonissue to their core constituents. Same can be said for members like Cheh, Evans, and Mendelsohn for wholly different reasons. Their constituents, by and large, do not see violence as an issue. They represent mostly liberals that are content with taking creative approaches to rehabbing these teens (Shakespeare) as long as they commit their crimes east of Rock Creek Park. Can you imagine if Schiraldi lived in G’town and the youth escaped from his home while trying to learning Shakespeare? Those people would be outraged.