My Neighborhood

I've wanted to make time to write you & say that I hope that you knew that my rather heated commentary on your comments about my neighborhood were not directed at you.  It is just a situation that I am beginning to see for what it really is, & I take it personally.  I've been thinking about it & I think I know why I feel that the crime around here isn't so dramatically bad (other than it's not - it just helps to sell a culture of fear…). 

First though, I want to comment that the new police sub-station hasn't been open much since most of the students have been gone.  Not quite sure what that says about the racist, classist overtones to the 'crime problem' here.  Just something I realized that I had noticed & have watched for since last Friday evening. 

A little after I realized the cops weren't around near as much (they most certainly didn't disappear!), I realized that the violence level at most military installations & their surrounds was much the same as here.  Military Police are busy at military housing areas.  Lots of people living below or well below the poverty line just trying to get by in a world stacked against them.  Lots of alcohol & minor drug violations - people cope in lots of ways & lots of domestic stuff; some of this stuff needs to be stopped & maybe punished, but much of it is just inserting a calmer presence before things get out of hand.  Either way it keeps the cops busy, and allows them to grow, expand, hire new officers - don't let them fool you, they love a good growth industry & somebody had to feed the Queen of Growth for the last couple of decades - the prison industry in America!  They sort by winner & loser, and they need to remove 'the problem,' so they jail them!  But you rarely hear this kind of commentary on the military - these expendable people don't need to be jailed - they serve another purpose, but we'll still keep them below poverty!  But the general public doesn't need to know about our little behavior problems - these folks at least have a use!  Look at the shocking rate of rape in the service academies, how about service-wide?

Crime can't be that horrible around here if we can seriously complain (and rightly so!) about the police shooting of Nathan Rusch and the mentally disabled young man (and this pretty much covers the extent of killings around here - one more non-police related one at the Eagle).

I'm not saying that it is the safest or best place to live but for people with no money & no legit way to make much more it is often home - and I've lived with these sorts of people for close to 20 years & my kids were raised in it.  They turned out OK so far by these peoples' system.  Hell, Jeremy is another perfect pawn - serving their purposes sitting in the desert north of Tikrit!  And Sara is at a premier college, and succeeding wildly by anyone's standards, and pretty much being paid to do so!  I guess all that this shows is that the environment is not necessarily damning, but it pretty much inherently is.  And it at least usually keeps at least one generation down….

Sorry for running on - I had a pint of beer earlier - and I have been thinking about this...  This in many ways hasn't been, and isn't, an easy realization for me.  I still have many ingrained prejudices on occasion, but I now see the vast similarity between two sub-cultures, one of which at least serves a purpose, for a while, the other just needs to be locked away...  "Growth is good!"

Intellectual property of Mark Lindner, 2003