The Failure of Community Activism

Heather McDonald has the real Chicago Crime story. It's caused by family breakdown, illegitimacy, the absence of fathers and, increasingly, mothers.

It's a long piece but well worth reading, including this chilling paragraph:

In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama’s former turf. Teenagers—some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested—swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside. Throughout the video, a male companion of the videographer reacts with nervously admiring “damns.”

The cure for this sort of dysfunctional culture would be greeted with the same outrage by the Left as the war in Iraq. It would require the mass taking away of children from dysfunctional families and neighborhoods and placing them in effectively-run boarding schools and orphanages. I can think of no other fix that would work or one less likely to be tried.