They Aren't Family

A homeless person is found frozen to death after an exceptionally cold night. Another is found severely beaten by a gang of thugs. A hooker is killed by a psycho customer -- or her boyfriend. A gang-banger is the target of a drive-by shooting. These are all people who appear to be free agents in an unfortunate sense -- basically alone in the world. And one would think they would be mourned by few, if any. But no! The minute something like this happens, family members appear -- by the dozen, by the score! Funerals and memorial services are held before a standing-room-only crowd. And my question is, where on earth were all these people back when the individual in question was laying rubber on the road to perdition? Why did no one intervene, or seem to care? Because they certainly seem to care enough now, i.e. now that the person is gone.

This is one of the many mysteries at the heart of life in the "inner city". I suspect that one factor is passivity, pure and simple. These are people who have become so "junked out" on government "programs", entitlements, and that mythical but tattered "safety net", that they have simply forgotten that there is any such thing as self-sufficiency. They have forgotten how to take care of themselves, or their own. You don't have to look any further than what happened when Katrina hit New Orleans to see what the consequences of that are. I also suspect that when you're talking about "problem" family members, most people, most of the time, are just as happy when whoever it is is out of sight, or maybe disappears altogether. Not that they _want_ the person to die, but the daily burden of having to deal with them is just too great. Or -- maybe they have tried, and despaired, because the person was simply too uncooperative, or incapable of being rehabilitated. There are probably as many answers as there are cases. But one telling point is that, in nearly every instance, the question, "Where did [blank] fail?" is filled in with the words "the system", and not "we", or "the family", or even "the local community"? This is what is known in social psychology as the "locus of control" issue -- which means, what people think determines their fate has a lot to do with what actually _does_ determine their fate. Call it self-fulfilling prophesy. If you consider yourself a victim, you'll probably become one eventually. If you think of yourself as a reed blowing in the wind, with no control over your social or economic situation, well, the system is perfectly happy relegating you to that status and helping you stay there. And our inner cities are full of examples of what is called "conditioned helplessness", on both the individual and the aggregate level. About all anyone ever says to the contrary -- and only on occasion -- is that they want to "take back the streets", which is another way of saying, we'll stay behind locked doors while the government sends in more cops. Well, that is not "taking back the streets", folks -- that's living in jail. Maybe having the police as your jailers is better than having the local street gangs as your jailers; I wouldn't know. But "empowerment" it ain't. And if you trace the roots of all of this pathlogy, it all goes back -- as so many commentators have pointed out -- to the family, or the lack thereof. Not that the family as an institution is dead in the inner cities; it is just distorted beyond recognition, and is really not getting the job done. If it were, those neighborhoods would look like places people could actually live in, rather than like war zones. If they want to take back the streets, they should start by taking back _normal_ family life, and by running the white liberal social workers and entitlement pushers out of town on a rail. (It also wouldn't hurt to hang a few drug dealers from the nearest lamp post -- something the government seems unwilling to do.) Then the real revolution can begin.