Budapest & Half Moon Bay: The Value Of Perspective - The American Conservative
"...(
Side note: Especially in a city like Baton Rouge, which, like crime-ridden New Orleans, has a
large contingent of poor young black men. You are not supposed to notice these things, but everybody does, because one's safety depends on it.
Friend of mine there, an older man, a white liberal Democrat who spent a lifetime working with law enforcement, told me once that one of the hardest things for him to deal with personally, as a liberal who despises our history of racism in Louisiana, is the reality of total social breakdown in the black community, and its causal intersection with violent crime in the city.
He told me that the truth is, the core of the problem is beyond the ability of the state to fix.
It all has to do with the annihilation of the family, in his view.
- He talked about going to court once and seeing a mother in handcuffs who had been brought out of prison to be present when her handcuffed teenage son stood before the judge for sentencing for some violent crime he had committed. That, for him, was a symbol of our city's tragedy. But no one talks about that publicly, for obvious reasons.
"So what's the solution?" I asked.
He shrugged, as if to say, there's not one, at least not one that can be imposed from the outside.)...
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