...You think the whites were the only ones shooting up the streets during Prohibition?
What changed was ending Prohibition.
But I will quote Malcolm X in my answer: "The only way to end ignorance is through education."
Look at inner city schools, inner city school violence, and inner city literacy rates.
THAT is where the government has truly failed. And I try to tell young guys coming out of school: learn a trade.
Spend a couple of years in a good trade and you can pay for your education with CASH.
No. The point was that violence with automatic weapons in the street is fueled by prohibition. The daily territorial violence. Not like the rare random mass shooters of today. That type of wide spread street violence in the white community started and ended with prohibition.
What you say about education is true, but like most people looking for solutions to these problems, you are missing the big picture.
This is no insult to your character or intelligence. I believe your intentions with this sentiment are pure and authentic. But it leaves out huge pieces of the puzzle.
The question is WHY do so many black people, especially young black men, not value education?
This is where it starts to get more complicated and people can’t see the whole thing.
I will use my family as an example. There are issues at play almost exclusively due to racism blacks have faced in America. However there are other issues that effect the white community as well, but not with the same magnitude.
My grandparents and older aunts and uncles. came of age in the golden age of post World War 2 America. Some people value education differently as natural default without outside influence. As blacks in the south they didn’t have the same resources and opportunities, but they worked hard.
They picked fruit or did the hardest, most dangerous jobs in the mines and used the money to get affordable college educations. As the Civil Rights movement progressed, their opportunities expanded. My family was not unique. A LARGE portion of SOUTHERN blacks were doing this.
Their incomes rose and their children did not have to work to support the family. So they didn’t have the same work ethic. They were still working good jobs, but some got caught up in the party culture of the 70s.
The 70 s were a turning point because drug importation began to explode and admiration for the drug dealer lifestyle began to spread.
Economic down turns and outsourcing hurt many cities and many people turned to street life to survive. Projects were built. Welfare checks were handed out. Jobs were hard to get. Nothing to do but get high or drunk. Many fell through the cracks. The people who were fortunate and/or persevered succeeded.
The 80s came. So did crack. The community COMPLETELY IMPLODED. It caught people by surprise. Coke and weed weren’t that big a deal. These little white flakes were harmless. THEY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG. Look at the difference between the way a powder head looks and the way a crack head looks and it tells you all you need to know.
Good, hard working people got addicted and turned to unrecognizable creatures. The sellers made a FORTUNE and turned the sexual marketplace and stays competition completely upside down. Cities turned to war zones with factions fighting for territory or addicts robbing for their next hit.
The children who grew up witnessing this catastrophe had ZERO chance to see the world the same way their parents and grandparents did.
Economic policy and the life style created by lucrative drug dealing created a large portion of the population who could not see the value of hard work because it didn’t match anything they saw in real life.
There are innumerable accounts of how the U.S. government’s resources were used to import and distribute drugs. This occurrence was no accident. It was known the effect that importing massive amounts of addictive drugs and making them illegal would have. It was down derail the astronomical progress black people were making after the 60s Civil Rights Movement.
The real legacy of racism and prohibition is the destruction of mind and spirit. People are so psychologically and emotionally destroyed they can’t even imagine desiring something better, let alone actually getting on the road of hard work to do it.
That was the goal the plan had in mind and it was executed to perfection. Yes some people can ignore the blight. Yes some people can stay focused and overcome. But many can’t and don’t.
Any leader with the foresight to see what was taking place was murdered. Strike the shepherd, scatter the sheep. It’s the 10-80-10 rule, but people pretend it doesn’t apply to the black community.
They spout off all the right wing rhetoric which is partially true in a vacuum. But life doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Everything effects everything else. This is a brief description of the recent problems in the black community. Haven’t even gotten to how slavery and Jim Crow etc, tie into all of this. It would take a series of long books to describe it( though that is what you might call this ridiculously long post lol).
Your advice to people to get a trade is VERY GOOD ADVICE. **** it is great advice. But when you look at the bigger picture that I haven’t really touched even the tip of the iceberg on(volumes upon volumes have been written on these things in much, much greater detail), you see how that advice is so ineffective to the larger problem, though it can have a profound affect on the individual that is able to receive and act on it.
