A Quote by Dave Reichert
Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.
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However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today.
You prevent kids from joining gangs by offering after-school programs, sports, mentoring, and positive engagement with adults. You intervene with gang members by offering alternatives and employment to help redirect their lives. You deal with areas of high gang crime activity with real community policing. We know what works.
The premature migration of very large numbers of people from rural areas to urban areas can give rise to a lot of strains to the urban infrastructure, which can also create problems of crime - law-and-order problems.
Meth is a major problem not only in our urban areas, but in most of the rural areas of Colorado. No region has been immune from this scourge and it is getting larger.
Unplanned urbanisation can create urban chaos and trigger urban violence.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste - not class, caste - a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status.
Today, 65 percent of America's population live in metropolitan areas - and 95 percent of all the transit miles traveled are traveled there. Metropolitan regions are the engines of our economy.
The truth is that no one who hasn't actually experienced the senseless chaos and violence of combat can possibly understand it, but those who have and who try to explain it to the rest of us are offering us a precious gift: a part of their soul that's been scorched in the flames of Hell. It's a little like trying to describe music to the deaf or color to the blind ... to make the irrational somewhat sensible, which is always confusing and frustrating, and ultimately futile.
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.
If we have learned anything in the past ten years, it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning. And we've been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we've allocated the wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We've never had justice in our courts for the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It's not that special. It really isn't.
That's the great thing about being in a band: it's a gang for people who are too wimpy to fight. You can create a gang and have an identity and fight for something and stand up for something just by making pop songs. They're my gang members and gang members are for life, and if you try and leave, we execute you. That's the way it goes. A simple bang, back of the head, into the river, and we keep moving on.
I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.
I think what is true is that there's been an underlying division in the United States. Some of it has to do with the fact that economic growth and recovery tends to be stronger in the cities and in urban areas. In some rural areas, particularly those that were reliant on manufacturing, there has been weaker growth, stagnation, people feeling as if their children won't do as well as they will.
India's infrastructure is pathetic, with frequent electric power breakdowns even in metropolitan cities, dangerously unhealthy water supply in urban areas, a galloping rate of HIV infection, and gaping potholes that dot our national highways.
You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.
Since 1975, violence has been recognized as a public health problem, in large part to former Surgeon Generals Dr. Koop and Dr. Satcher's pioneering efforts to make the health approach a national priority. Since then, we've seen that violence can be curbed - and stopped - if we treat it as we would any other epidemic health concern.
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