We Celebrated That Mother in Baltimore. Now, Are We Willing to Face Our Own Hypocrisy?

[Sheldon Cooper]

I remember the day she beat him with a broomstick.

My oldest brother Donnie had been caught hanging out on the corner with the “wrong crowd,” puffing on the filtered butt of a Kool cigarette. He was 14, some nine years older than me, and already stood much taller than our mother. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, weighing all but 90 pounds.

The year was 1973.

My father was murdered a few months later and, I suppose, Mama was afraid that her first-born son was traveling the same road. She would’ve done anything to save his life. That I know for sure.


Read more: http://bluenationreview.com/we-celebrated-that-mother-in-baltimore-now-are-we-willing-to-face-our-own-hypocrisy/#ixzz3YhTBQ7HJ

[Sheldon Cooper]

1. More from this very good article:

That is no indictment on the mother from Baltimore or my own. It does, however, speak to our collective hypocrisy.

As a society, we have supported public policies that create deep pockets of poverty and need. We built interstate highways that cut off entire communities, producing dead-end streets and drug traps. We permitted institutions to crumble without investment, and then wonder why families fall by the wayside. We redlined whole cities, allowing predatory payday loan, title pawn, and check cashing stores to flourish. Today, they are more prevalent than liquor stores and churches.

We burn bridges to meaningful opportunity then blame the people we isolate when they fail to embrace the “American Dream.” When families struggling on the margins cry out for help, we turn a blind eye. We stand safely beyond the walls of containment we erected and cast moral aspersions to assuage our own complicity. That is the enduring legacy of Jim Crow, segregationist policies that kept people locked up and locked out.

From the comfort of our living rooms, or from behind a computer keyboard, we watch the unrest unfolding in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore. Why can’t they be like us, we ask, with no small irony. Why can’t they be like Dr. King?


Read more: http://bluenationreview.com/we-celebrated-that-mother-in-baltimore-now-are-we-willing-to-face-our-own-hypocrisy/#ixzz3YhTou01t

[daleanime]

2. K&R....

[underahedgerow]

3. “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their

infancy and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”

― Thomas More, Utopia

[Protalker]

4. For What?

For the last 30 years I have worked with poor addicts in the public sector. I still flinch when a person stated I started shooting up with my dad at 15. Any good parent does not want their child to get a felony, knowing it puts a cap on their future prospects.If your life is prescribed by an early circumstance what can your dreams be.If you don't want more for yourself the drugs are to good not to go back to.