Quote Originally Posted by Newmexican View Post
While Obama's visit won't change their lives, parents and others in the community can have an impact, the teens said. But ultimately, they said, it is up to the young people themselves.
This is the saddest statement of all. If non-violence is up to the teens, themselves, then it will never end. Teens - or anybody else for that matter - can't end senseless violence because the violence makes perfect sense. Most people act today with a view toward the future. For example, is a supervisor is a jerk, people tend to not make a do-or-die issue of it, because they're thinking about the future: house payments, kids in school, etc. *But* behaving that presumes that those people believe that they have a future. The teens who kill each other have decided - probably correctly - that they do not have a future. So they act in the present. Bang, bang, another black kid dies in the street.

IMO African Americans only have one problem: Not enough of their men have decent jobs. Other things are mere symptoms. 'Bama actually did allude to the cure toward the end of his State of the Union address. When he said something to the effect that people should be trained to build houses in their neighborhoods, he was alluding to a December 9, 2009 letter from the Congressional Black Caucus which called for jobs and job training for Americans who live in the poorest neigbourhoods.

'Bama never acknowledged that letter, probably because its first paragraph called for the funds to go to American citizens. Now that he's placed his precious Undocumented Democrats of the road to amnesty, he's willing to let Americans compete with them for any jobs and job training money that turns up. What a guy!
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