There is a small corner lot on 35th st just a block or 2 west of Prospect. I suspect in it's former life the lot held a house. Now it is surrounded by a black metal fence. A small cluster of mostly plastic playground equipment, a swing, slide, monkey bars. There's no basketball court, not room for one. From time to time I'll see some teenage mother playing with her child on the equipment. More often than not the park is occupied by another group. They wear matching outfits. I'm always reminded of those special charity walks that spring up in Kansas City.
You know the type. A sea of pink t shirts fighting breast cancer. Another one, although the particular cause eludes me at the moment, a sea of 20 and 30 somethings, broken into smaller groups, stumbling down Broadway and through Westport. Young white adults,matching T shirts, using the cause de jour as an excuse to get shit faced drunk. The occasional pair of girlfriends sitting on the curb, one holding the others hair up as she vomits Walt Disney Technicolor jello shots into the gutter.
Back to the little park. The T shirts are size 8 fuckin X. Always either white or red. Same with their shorts. They aren't really shorts, more like high water pants. Back in the stone age I came up in, you would have been ridiculed mercilessly for wearing shit like that. Crack a joke about one of this groups clown size clothes today and you're likely to get lead poisoning. Unlike the earlier mentioned groups, the giant T shirts don't have a symbol or catchy logo silk screened across the front. No pink ribbon. No "Fight for a cure". This group doesn't have a cause. They are a cause. A lost cause.
Yesterday there was just 3 of them at the park. Two of them sat on red plastic milk crates. The third was on a swing. Giant T shirt flapping in the breeze. Swinging. Last week there was a good dozen of them. A crap game on the sidewalk leading into the park. A girl who couldn't have been more than 15 or 16 watched her toddler play on the plastic slide.
There was a time in the not too distant past, at the inception of this blog, when I held some grudging sympathy/ empathy for these young guys. A regular reader from Chicago called me one of the most racially apologetic white boys he knew. I mistakenly saw a little of my own youthful ignorance in the sleepy eyed young thugs. I'd done the full tour. Every juvenile institution in the state had been home at one point or the other. I'd walked the same prison yards as guys just like the group in the park. So I felt obligated to give them a pass, lay the blame for their lot in life at societies feet. I'm over that shit. Over and done with it.
Which brings me to the Plaza MOB problems. I capitalized mob because that's what it is, even though Alvin Brooks, the octogenarian voice of the black community took exception to the term MOB. Local conservative talk show Shanin and Parks interviewed Brooks. When one of the hosts called the mass of black teens, tweens, preteens, and young adults, a mob, Brooks in his own words "spanked" the interviewer for daring to use a word that was so racially charged. And therein lies the problem. If you don't put on your PC hat, tiptoe around the race issue, then you are going to get "spanked".
So what is the connection between young, black, gang bangers and unruly black youth mobs on the Plaza? They are one and the same. Period. There is no difference between hundreds of kids taking over an entire shopping district, and a dozen teens taking over a small playground intended for toddlers. Three kids not yet in high school were shot Saturday night on the Plaza. How is that different from the endless string of shootings on the east side? Same perps, same victims. Same fuckin thing.
You need look no further than this money quote from some limey sociologist regarding the cause of the riots that recently crippled the UK.
"I strongly suspect that it's people who are unemployed or on very low income who are involved in this. People are constantly bombarded with advertising and they see these shops full of goods they can't afford and would like to buy and are being encouraged to buy, there's a lot of that going on." So says Paul Bagguley, a sociologist from the University of Leeds.
So it's the haves vs. the have nots. Never mind that the London riots and the Plaza mobs were largely brought about by cellphones. Ever see a picture of a starving Ethiopian holding a cellphone in one hand and an empty bowl in the other? No? Do you know why you have never seen a starving Ethiopian holding a cellphone? Because they are fucking impoverished, that's why. We don't know dick about poverty in this country. By and large you won't find children with distended bellies, flies covering their faces, waiting for death to do it's job. Not here. Not in this country. Poor people still manage to cart their kids across town to hang out. Poor people still manage to be the most obese group in America. Welfare feeds them, the government provides. the average poor kid in America lives like a fucking king compared to third world poor.
This shit on the Plaza is happening because the city lets it happen. Action is only taken when the Mayor gets within earshot of a pistol. This shit has nothing to do with poverty, lack of anything to do or the means to do it. Meanwhile young black thugs kill each other along with anyone unlucky enough to be in the area. It happens daily on the east side, on the south side, in northeast. Calling it a parenting problem is a joke, because the parents who drop their children off in an area that has been all over the news in recent weeks, are not really worried about parenting. They don't give a rats ass about their children. Give it a name, but don't sugarcoat it in a dusting of politically correct hand wringing over the plight of the less fortunate in this country. The least fortunate in America have it made in comparison to the truly poor in the world.
