Poverty youth ( Was: Age and violence stats)

QueeneMUSE@aol.com
Wed, 1 Jul 1998 12:21:41 EDT

In a message dated 6/30/98 5:19:37 PM, retroman wrote:

>There is also the factor that crime tends to be higher in welfare states that
>limit support to males beyond childhood. Once the boys grow up and can't live
off
>the welfare trough, which they have been raised to beleive they are
'entitled'
>to, they certainly are pissed.

	Look, "they"  are far more than childishly "pissed".
	What "they" are is - untrained, uneducated, unskilled and illiterate - we are
talking seriously unempowered, unfed, molested, ill-clothed, peer-pressured into gangs (don't even get me started on that) and 99% possiblity of drug use and arrests by about fifteen.

Unprepared - by the Darwinistic environement they sum up from - to do much good for themselves.

Many choose crime OVER welfare, not because "they" were rejected by it - more likely because 1) they are suicidial or 2) they have too much indiginous pride to eat out of the gov'ts piggy "trough".

If one has the balls to stop badmouthing people and making sweeping generalizationst and go in and try to actively reform an individual who was raised thusly, (excluding the ones who are too brain damaged from crackparents or mal-nourishement) one usually finds - not your imaginary spoiled child, blissfully living off the tit of the welfare system, but a *grief* stricken young man, living in a war-zone, most of his friends dead or insitutionalized, beat to shit by the teachers, the cops and hearing that demeaning crap from people like you - pardon me for saying it.

He is left bereft of his most precious assest, his self esteem and the knowledge that he has anything to contribute.

Yet he still has willingness and hope that he will find a job, a family and a life.
Yet he still has energy to learn new skills, to make art and have ideas. Yet he still wants what many of us do: respect, money, and power....

N

"The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer" Heinz R. Pagels - Perfect Symmetry