Fwd: Communities

'When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting. … They're stealing. They need to be treated as criminals…

 

'Without making any excuse for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that, if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty, they've got parents, often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves, can't do right by their kids—if it's more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead than they go to college, in communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men—communities where there is no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away, and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks—in those environments, if we think that we are just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there, without, as a nation and as a society, saying, "What can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity," then we are not going to solve this problem.'       Obama 4/27

 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/baltimore-obama-and-clinton-an-agenda-emerges