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Back to the Forum Archives The question is not that we made the headlines. After all, the media would rather have news to report than to make some up as they sometimes do. The question is, what caused the rioting. To find the cause, our governor and everyone else is looking at recent events in Benton Harbor. I submit that recent events is the wrong time frame. The riots were not caused by the idiot, nor by the current police force. They were not caused by any recent events. The powder keg has exploded and, as usual, we have mistaken the trigger for the cause. What happened in that city was caused twenty to forty years ago when those rioters were children. Those people are frightened, confused, ignorant, poor, and desperate. They do not understand all of that. They only understand that they are angry. The failure is not now. The failure was many years ago when they were children being not educated. At that time, some of those kids wanted to go to school and become successful. They did care. They were short changed by a short sighted government system. They were treated differently, because they were different. They could jive and we couldn't. We still can't jive and they don't care anymore. We cannot fix it for them. They will live out their lives pretty much as they are now. We can hope to keep them from doing more damage. It will help to try to provide them with employment, but that will not take away their ignorance. Nothing we do will achieve that now. Its too late. It was too late when they graduated from highschool without a highschool education. A highschool diploma with no education becomes obvious when the victim tries to understand simple directions and fails. What we should do is fix it for the kids of these lost people. Let's remember, it is not these people who have failed, it's our communities and K-12 educational systems. It is also not their kids who have failed, but we are in imminent danger of causing them to fail too. The kids have been punished enough by what has already happened to them. They did nothing to deserve that. We can and should do what it takes to educate their kids and break the cycle. If we do not, the cycle will continue. The wheel of pain and misery will continue to roll and the cost will continue to rise. People will say it costs too much and we cannot afford it. I say crap! If we look at the facts we will discover the cost of ignorance has already become untenable. The cost of education is cheap at any price. If we don't save these kids most of them will fail and become
liabilities instead of assets to their communities. They cannot
make it without help. That's the truth. Please don't give me
the Horatio Alger, Raggedy Dick story. That is cute fiction,
but fiction. One in ten thousand of these kids might get lucky
and make it in sports or some such. A few others will climb partway
out of it through effort alone. Most will live lives of misery
from birth to death and the cycle will continue. We know that's
true. When will we do something about it?
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