Thursday, August 07, 2008
The “Politics” of
Recently, while doing my laundry in a neighborhood Laundromat, I happened to be listening to the radio that was playing inside the establishment. The proprietor of the Laundromat had his radio tuned to a Spanish language station, and the program was a question and answer forum with one of the leaders of one of our larger metropolitan areas. Though I do not understand much Spanish, I was able to follow along with the program because the individual being interviewed didn’t speak Spanish either, so everything was being translated into English. This made keeping up with the conversations easier for me.
The interview focused on the usual topics of conversation in Urban America: gangs, drugs, crime, and the homeless. The questions were being answered by an individual who happened to be the mayor of his city, and his answers seemed to be the same political posturing that we the people are forced to heat and accept over and over again. The mayor informed the listeners about the numerous shelters and youth clubs that had been opened and would be opened soon. He also mentioned the different task forces that had been assigned to one problem or another. Most politicians believe that this approach is all that is necessary to clean up our cities. This led me to believe that the individuals in power in many of the major cities across the country have no idea what to do about these problems.
The usual reasons given for why a child elects to join a gang is as the result of peer pressure or fear. The reasons given for why people get involved with drugs are because they suffer from low self-esteem or depression. Homeless people are usually described as people who have suffered some significant financial hardship or who allowed substance abuse to ruin their lives beyond repair. While these are all good reasons to explain why these problems exist, they are only symptomatic of the real underlying issues surrounding these situations.
How did the homeless person come to suffer his financial hardship or substance abuse problem? What can we as a society do to help correct, or at least improve the situation? Will providing homeless people with a bed for the night help those people to become self-sufficient in the morning? These are questions that must be addressed before the plight of the homeless can truly be rectified. Questions of this kind also need to be addressed with regards to the crime, drug, and gang problems that exist across the country. Understanding peer pressure is one thing, but understanding why or how peer pressure is able to so thoroughly override the love and understanding of the family unit is one of the keys to beginning to solve the problems of society.
The politicians set up their task forces, then assign said task forces to investigate particular problems. The people assigned to the task forces spend their time, as well as our tax dollars, opening boy’s and girl’s clubs, or putting more police on the streets. These are all noble efforts, but many elected officials appear to be blind to the big picture. What they do not understand is that by simply erecting a shiny, new building for the children, and without having taken steps to curb the children’s criminal tendencies, you are simply giving the criminals a new place from which to operate.
Drug dealers and gang members are able to function in certain neighborhoods because the neighborhoods are virtually uninhabited by police officers, but the only thing that putting more police in these areas does is force the drug dealers to set up shop on a different block. What the task forces need to do is to get in touch with the parents, the neighbors, the schools, and the kids themselves, in order to find out what problems these kids and their families are having, what these kids are looking for, and how it could be obtained without the necessities of gangs, drugs or criminal activity. It is possible that these young people are having trouble in school or their parents are having trouble feeding the family. The parents may not even be present, so before we build buildings that people may not need, we should first try to find out what these people actually do need.
Homelessness is an altogether different issue. The common misconception is that all homeless people are drug addicted, alcohol abusing, lazy vagabonds or con-artists who are only interested in obtaining a quick fix. While this may be true in some cases, obviously this is not true in every situation. A good percentage of homeless people are people who simply had a series of bad breaks from which they were unable to recover before it became too late. The reason that the politicians don’t know or understand this is because the homeless problem has never actually been researched. Just like in every other situation, it is easier to open a shelter in order to get them off the streets than to actually try and conjure up a solution. Once again, the question of whether or not providing homeless people with beds at night helps them to become self-sufficient in the morning arises. What the politicians need to do is to try and find out from these people why they are in the position that they are in, examine how they got there, then try to figure out, not only how to reverse the situation, but also how to prevent it from reoccurring.
A wise person once said that before you can really understand where a man had been, you must first walk a mile in his shoes. While I am not suggesting that elected officials use drugs, join gangs, rob liquor stores or sleep on the streets, I am suggesting that it may be difficult to really understand what’s going on without having actually lived through it. For years, elected officials have been trying to solve the problems of society by spending tax dollars on buildings that they can put their names on. Until they actually get in touch with the people who are contributing to and suffering from these problems, then these problems can never really be solved.
