What Does Obama Really Believe In?
As a young community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama concluded that to make a real difference, he needed to gain power. But did he actually make a difference?
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From the back seat of Steve Gatess white Pontiac, Monique Robbins spotted Jasmine Coleman walking home from school alone. It was an icy December afternoon on Chicagos South Side, and Jasmines only protection against the wind was a thin purple jacket. She looked cold. Gates pulled the car over to the curb, and Robbins hollered at Jasmine to get in.
Jasmine was 16, and Robbins and Gates, who were both in their 30s, were her neighbors. All three of them lived in or around Roseland, a patch of distinctly subprime Chicago real estate that stretches from 89th Street to 115th Street, way down past the last stop on the El. Fifty years ago, Roseland was a prosperous part of Chicago, home to thousands of blue-collar workers, most of them white, employed by the South Sides many steel and manufacturing plants. But the plants closed long ago, the white residents all moved away and Roseland has become one of the worst-off parts of the city by just about every measure you can think of: unemployment rate, dropout rate, murder rate or just the barren, empty feel of the streets.
Looking out for Jasmine and young people like her in Roseland and other blighted sections of Chicago was Gatess full-time job. He worked for an organization called Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), acting as a mentor to the students in public high schools who were deemed most at risk. I met Gates, who is a laid-back, burly guy with tight dreadlocks and penetrating pale gray eyes, in the fall of 2010, and for several months he let me watch him at work, becoming, in the process, my unofficial guide to Roseland.
Gates pulled the car up in front of Jasmines house on Lafayette Avenue, and Jasmine ran in to fetch her brother, Damien, who was also enrolled in YAP. Their house looked small and battered. The metal gate guarding the front door was torn off its hinges, and there was a fist-size hole in the front window. Damien, a handsome 17-year-old, sauntered out to the car behind Jasmine, and the two of them piled in the back while Gates kept the car running for warmth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/obama-poverty.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120819
still_one
(92,190 posts)JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)This is the modern style of news writing. I read two paragraphs, and if I do not yet know what the story is about I drop it and move to another article. I read three or four paragraphs of this one and saw no connection whatever to the headline, so I ditched it. So I don't know if it was a good story or not, and I have no idea what Obama believes in, or what the writer thinks Obama believes in. I'm still not sure the story was about Obama at all.
Read the San Francisco Chronicle sometime. That is how stories should be written. "Who, what, where and when" are all answered in the first paragraph. "Why" is explained in the body of the story.
still_one
(92,190 posts)I do not think many people will get that far into the story.
What you said is right on, who, what, where, and when. Even if not in the first paragraph, at least in the first page
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)If they can't get to the point, they should write something other than news articles.
groovedaddy
(6,229 posts)the NYT plugline at the beginning. This was Sunday edition "magazine" article, which tend to be written differently. To me the subject matter is certainly relevant and Obama has been hammered over not addressing the issue of poverty while in the White House. But, then, the guy does have a lot on his plate!