Crime

Yesterday, an old friend asked me a question:

“Most every city has a poor(er) area, with higher crime rates and all that accompanies. Given your expertise, what can cities do to uplift those areas? Or are even the best efforts doomed to fail because there will always be a poor(er) area with higher crime rates, etc.? I wondered whether "low-income" housing would help the area but then questioned whether higher-income development would result in forcing the truly low-income folks elsewhere”

My answer: You have asked question that has confounded the experts for years. As you know, that's never stopped me from trying.

First: ghettos are ghettos, no matter how many pretty bows we place on them or what many fancy names we use for them. A gated-community ghetto can still be damaging to society when it dooms interaction among socio-economic groups. Second, even at the highest levels of government, we cannot escape the cognitive failure of confusing correlation with causation, for example, some high-density areas are correlated with crime, so high densities must create crime. Well, we have a condo in the highest-density spot in Little Rock and the most common crime there is dumping over-sized loads into the garbage chute.

The question is much too complicated for a sound-bite. Maybe I'll post some ideas in the future. In my opinion, the systemic bigotry that has erupted like some 1950s subterranean monster accounts for much of it, maybe most of it. I can’t believe the epidemic of hatred and racism unleashed by America’s electing an African-American president … twice.

On the other hand, and I can't say this publicly, but drug use and the failure of some ethnic groups to self-police is retarding progress. On the other, other hand, forced busing led droves of generally law-abiding citizens to flee to sundown cities, facilitated by the decision of the Arkansas Highway Construction Department to facilitate the flight by building more and better commuter lanes. In addition, there’s

·       Income inequality

·       White-flight

·       The attack on public schools by the ultra-rich

·       Military spending instead of people spending

·       Emphasis by cities on growing population instead of growing their people

·       The almost sexual obsession with guns and violence by many Americans

Oh hell, don't get me started. Stay tuned.

As an aside, we had a late Christmas lunch with some Hispanic friends in the Lonoke area yesterday and heard a harrowing story from two (both long-term residents and model citizens) of how a police officer harassed them in one's front year for GTWWH (going to work while Hispanic. I'm having a hard time being optimistic these days.

One of the men was someone whom we helped gain a college education. We could have ignored him. Problem was, he was extremely intelligent and verging on bitterness. I kept thinking of the Bob Dylan line, "Yonder stands your orphan with his gun." Does the libertarian Nirvana of complete selfishness outweigh the cost of all those prisons?

Politically-inspired hatred of one another ain’t helping a bit. Old friend, you just had to pull my chain, didn’t you? 

Where You Stand and Why

After much thought, I’ve reached a conclusion. I will not, of my accord, lose a dear friend simply because your political views differ from mine. I will not discuss politics with you. History, science, and other fact-based or thought-inspired topics await us in legion. None of us will live long enough to exhaust the storehouse. If you bring up current politics, My response will be, “Our views differ.” Although not a particularly religious person, my views find basis in the Beatitudes, from The Sermon on the Mount. If yours don’t, you keep your Leviticus and I’ll keep my Galilean. Let’s talk about the 75 percent of things we likely agree upon. My only caveat is that if your beliefs force you into harmful actions against a decent person who means no one harm. It may well be Auf Wiedersehen.

Notice I didn't say "perfect person." I don't run across many in my day-to-day wanderings.