It's that time again, let me get out my soap box.

Once upon a time in a quaint little Kansas City suburb called Grandview people felt safe and secure. That's how fairy tales often begin, but the truth is Grandview has just been a smaller version of the inner city, for the last 15 or 20 years. You need look no further than last nights shooting at the IHOP in the old Truman Corners shopping center. Four teenagers, count em, 4, where shot in the parking lot. The cops found about 40 shell casings. What was it, 3 or 4 months ago when a shooting occurred at the VFW hall, again young African Americans the victims and shooters. Grandview isn't alone in the surge of gang related violence, Raytown, Hickman, Ruskin, Independence, and the once exclusively white bread south Kansas City have slowly been inundated with urban gangstas. The last great bastion of polo shirts and overpriced cramped subdivisions, JOCO, is also starting to feel the heat.

The trickle down effect of gangs from the urban core to the once safe burbs, begs the questions, why is the problem spreading and who is responsible. Tough questions , call for tough answers. I may, no, I will piss off more than a few people with this post, but it's time people got a little pissed off, kids are dropping like flies. Young black kids, and more and more, young Hispanic kids.
White flight from the city proper, really took off in the 80's, by the 90's the problems these people ran away from, had come to roost, and bit the suburbanites in the ass. You can run, but you cant hide.

So who is to blame for the spreading violence? It's a long list.
I start first with the parents. In the Grandview shootings, this occurred at 1:30 in the morning. Why are your kids hanging out in a parking lot at 1:30 on a Monday morning? By all reports there were at least 100 kids in the parking lot. That means a couple hundred parents were allowing their children to run amok. Yeah, I know, they are young black kids, they cant find work, nobody will hire them, it's because they are black. Sound about right? To me it sounds like bullshit, and a big part of the problem. These kids need direction and guidance, it is supposed to come from the parents. The problem is, that so many parents in the African American community have given up on themselves, and infected their own children with the belief that they have no hope of succeeding because of their skin pigmentation.

Minority community leaders are another guilty party to all of this. They perpetuate the same defeatist attitude. They lay blame at the feet of government, police, society, whites, racism and a plethora of supposed guilty parties. Rarely do you hear them decry the breakdown of the family, lack of parental involvement or the absence of father figures as the culprit. When the leading cause of death for young black men, is other young black men, these leaders blame the violence on the cops lack of action. They offer up this half truth, and avoid offending the parents and black community as a whole. They tell them what they want to hear, even while they kill one another in the streets. These supposed leaders are absentee landlords, they mouth words of absolution to the very people they should be chastising.

White Kansas Citians, thought I was going to let you slide, sorry. Whites share a big chunk of the blame here. You people fled this city at the first sign of trouble. You took an us against them attitude. You only came back to the city when you absolutely had to. You built up the burbs and told yourselves it was all the black folks fault and problem. You moved to the suburbs where your biggest problem was getting little Buffy to stop throwing up after she ate, and trying to keep Timmy off the Meth. You told yourselves, Those people are animals, and you did what you thought passed for protecting your children, lives and property. You turned your back on your neighbors. Sadly you still think it's a Black problem, while your children do their best to emulate the very people you sought to isolate them from. Now you find much to your dismay, the very people you fled from have moved in across the street. I hear Harrisonville is a nice place.

The City government, the people charged and sworn to serve its residents remains mute. They focus on the pockets of mostly white, mostly middle class areas of the city. Urban blight eats away at the neighborhoods, largely ignored until election time nears. Come election time you run across the tracks and blow smoke up the ass of the poor in hopes of getting their votes. This shows how out of touch you are. Voting isn't a priority to people who are trying to avoid getting shot or are busy burying their children or visiting them in prison. When the elections are over, nothing changes.

The police. The police haven't bothered to change the way they operate. You need look no further than the city of Los Angeles for a prime example of what happens when you ignore gang violence, because it's confined to a certain section of the city. There isn't a suburb in LA that isn't touched by gangs now. We are just a smaller version of that same domino effect. Yet the police employ the same tactics that have allowed gangs to proliferate in Los Angeles. A heavy handed approach alone wont curb the violence and it wont contain the problem.

The Kansas City school district, is a major player in this mess. It is your job to help these kids, and not to fuck them up. We have a school board that lacks any concern for the children in their charge. They spend all of their time blaming the Superintendent Du Jour or fighting over money and contracts. The result is a graduation rate of under 50 percent, one of the lowest in the nation.

So, we are really, in the end, all to blame. The problem is that nobody wants to shoulder their share. The blacks blame the whites, the whites return the favor, and the people charged to serve and protect stand idly by and piss in the wind. If you were hoping to hear how to fix the problem, I'm afraid you have come to the wrong place. I honestly don't think the problem can be fixed. I think we have painted ourselves in to a corner. Putting pressure on inner city gangs just redistributes the problem. The leaders who do have influence with minority communities continue to pay lip service to them, rather than actually lay a fair share of the blame at their feet. the white middle class will just keep moving, blind to the fact that the problem only follows them.

But all is not completely hopeless. There are still kids who defy the odds. They somehow manage to excel despite the shitty conditions they are forced to endure. They have their parents to thank, for not caving in and taking the easy route.