I’ll let you ask Charles Krauthammer about severed spinal cords.
His was severed in a diving accident while he was a student at Harvard Medical School. He’s been a quadrapalegic in a wheelchair ever since.
I guess that says as much about Mississippi and Louisiana as it does about Baltimore.
And Oklahoma, and Texas, and…
I’ll take a wild guess that poetheart has rarely (if ever) listened to what Charles the All Wise has had to say, with an open mind and not assuming that he is one of “those people” shaking his finger at others.
Though it doesn’t take a genius to posit that the two most pressing causes of breakdowns in the inner city communities are single parent families and terrible schools. Not exactly fighting words, either, more like a major “duh”.
Perhaps it would be more politically correct to claim the two most pressing causes were racism and the police. Better?
FWIW 43% of the Baltimore Police Department is black. So are the mayor, police chief and police commissioner. I doubt all the police involved were white.
The autopsy on Gray is not complete until his tox screen is complete. It generally takes two weeks. He was on bail for selling drugs and it’s entirely possible that he swallowed his entire inventory while fleeing from an officer who recognized him. If he indeed beat his own head against the paddy wagon, the wagon will probably have dents. The fact that the driver stopped the wagon and asked for leg chains implies a handcuffed Gray was beating against the sides. This happens with mental subjects and highly intoxicated individuals. It makes no sense but it happens.
There is an FBI investigation. The truth will come out. If one of the arresting officers “severed” Gray’s spinal cord during the arrest he will be punished. Six or seven police officers will not be able to maintain a conspiracy. Gray seemed to have use of his legs while going in the van. Baltimore is a very wired city. If the police dragged him out and broke his spinal cord on the way to lock up it was likely caught on tape. Just because the Justice Department is not issuing snippets of evidence does not mean it is not being gathered. The protesting and rioting was premature.
I’m a little sick of the police hate by certain members here. Police officers are individuals; some good, some criminal. No one wants the criminal police. Would you be happier living under anarchy? The actions of the teens in Baltimore should give you a little taste of what that would be like.
Ol’ Chucky K’s accident sure turned him into a real compassionate, caring person, didn’t it?
And his white-guy spinal cord sure wouldn’t have been severed by the cops at Harvard.
“Ol’ Chucky K’s accident sure turned him into a real compassionate, caring person, didn’t it?
And his white-guy spinal cord sure wouldn’t have been severed by the cops at Harvard.”
That’s a pretty nasty comment. It certainly reflects upon your lack of compassion, not his.
Yes. Mississippi suffered the same ill effects on their poor populations from decades of single-party rule. Fortunately, they’ve been able to bend the curve upwards. The four year graduation rate in Mississippi is now 75.5%:
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state.html
I can’t find comparable data for Baltimore (they report a five year graduation rate which is not comparable). Using the same US Dept of Ed measure as the Mississippi number, Washington DC schools graduate 62.3%.
The five year graduation rate for Baltimore city schools in the same year (2013) was 73.5%, just slightly behind Mississippi, although with a more lenient standard than the four year graduation rate used in Mississippi and nationally.
Sounds like Mississippi is getting a bargain for their money. They are one of the lowest spending states on education, and Maryland is one of the highest. Just think if they had the money that Maryland did, what their graduation rate would be, and how much better their education could be.
I found four-year graduation stats for Baltimore city schools and Mississippi schools
For 2012:
66.5% Baltimore City schools
75.5% Miss statewide
If it’s any consolation, Baltimore does beat the closest Miss has to a big city, the Jackson city public school district (64.1 %), That is one of the worst in Mississippi, so I guess there’s something for the political leaders in Baltimore to hang their hats on.
There were riots…much worse riots in Asian countries.
One of the most recent examples happened in South Korea in the early 1980’s in the city of Gwanju where students and local residents fed up with coups and the Chun Doo Hwan military dictatorship decided to stage an uprising where they seized local armories, actively engaged in urban warfare with the military dictatorship, and kept the military forces at bay for a few days before superior military resources and ruthless suppression policies won out. Yes, they had to send in several army divisions to suppress the uprising.
In the aftermath, there was so much death and destruction the dictatorship did their utmost to censor and shape news coverage to portray the protestors as negatively as possible. Only after South Korea started holding democratic elections did the full details of that uprising became widely disseminated in public and to some extent, internationally. There’s a memorial now to those who participated in the uprising while those who ordered the suppression were tried and found guilty…before being pardoned in a gesture of national reconciliation many uprising participants and victim families had serious issues with considering the brutality they/their kin experienced.
Mainland China had a sort of decade-long series of riots known as the Cultural Revolution where high school and middle school students ran amuck as Red Guards beating people up, killing some, destroying structures and historical artifacts, and even having factional battles among themselves with some official encouragement before even Mao felt they went too far and eventually sent them along with the “Bad intellectuals” to perform forced labor in the countryside.
More recently, sometime in the '90s discontented farmers in rural areas launched uprisings so serious the PLA had to be called in with artillery and air support to put them down.
More recently, there have been a series of riots in Mainland China over the Japan’s wartime legacy which while encouraged a bit officially, ended up having to be quashed when the “street” showed itself to be much more angered by that legacy than the Chinese communist party.
Japan had the Koza riots in Okinawa which was sparked by anger at US military presence on the Island(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koza_riot) and some others:
Yes. I haven’t tracked down the stats and I’m sure there are umpteen different ways of measuring it, but I saw one mention today that Baltimore is in the top five highest cities is the US for total tax rates. Perhaps the voters could ask their political leaders where the money goes and whether they are getting good value in return.
Single party politics and public employee unions are a tough combination. There are quite a few cities in the US at or on the verge of failure and fiscal insolvency despite very high tax rates.
While the riots don’t help much and cause much suffering, history has shown plenty of examples of how they often occur as a result of the rioter population feeling they have nothing to lose because they feel they don’t have a voice which will be heard by TPTB and every other legitimate avenue they’ve tried has been stymied by those in power.
One only needs to look at the leadup to the following events to understand this:
American Revolution
French Revolution
Slave uprisings in the US such as Nat Turner’s in 1831. Incidentally, the issue of slave uprisings was one of the key reasons why the Citadel and other southern military colleges were founded.
Chinese Revolution of 1911
Russian Revolutions of 1905 - A good case study of what happens when an autocratic ruler overreacts against prudent advice and orders a bloody crackdown when the issue could have been resolved with some tactful dialogue. And this event eventually lead to the formulation of more radicalized opposition groups…including the Bolsheviks which seized power in 1918.
In the case of Baltimore, the stark economic and social inequality was apparent from visiting the Inner Harbor/Camden Yards areas and finding one or two wrong turns not too far away can land you in some of the most blighted poverty stricken neighborhoods in the city.
Another thing an examination of history shows is how expecting people already heavily marginalized in their lives by the larger society to the point they feel they have nothing to lose except to riot is asking quite a lot. When people/groups are pushed to the point they feel cornered and backed to a wall, they don’t tend to react well…or are able to separate themselves from the daily marginalization to sit back and decide on a “more reasonable” course of action.
Last I checked, Mississippi is ranked among the worst states for educational quality of their public schools. From my Mississippi cousins’ own experiences, many of their local private schools aren’t any better…and sometimes worse.*
A reason why their parents ended up taking them out of the local private school. One ended up attending a NE prep school known among the CC set and another a much more academically reputable regional Catholic prep school.
- From their accounts, only noticeable difference between the local public and local private schools was the race and SES of the families of the students.
Sounds like a pretty devastating indictment of the failed policies of those in political power in Baltimore for the last 40 years.
Wait a minute. The comparison should be: 75.5% Miss statewide, 85% Maryland statewide
Which indicates that citizens of Mississippi are not getting a “bargain,” they get what they pay for.
Same for Louisiana at 73%
Is it necessarily that…or something much larger and systemic…such as the effects of White flight to the suburbs which occurred around 4 decades ago and with it a large portion of the tax base.
This aspect was apparent to my Mississippi relatives in the course of observing the racial/SES makeup of their suburban neighborhood compared with the poorer urban center. Many of their White neighbors weren’t exactly shy about hiding that as a reason for moving there, either.
"Last I checked, Mississippi is ranked among the worst states for educational quality of their public schools. From my Mississippi cousins’ own experiences, many of their local private schools aren’t any better…and sometimes worse.*
Noooo…not the cousins! Okay, from my own one personal example, I must admit that when we lived in Tennessee, we were looking for private schools for our kids. I was talking to one lady at my workplace who was raving about the amazing private school that her kids were attending in Mississippi (we were near the state line). She practically had me convinced to look into it, until she told me, “They don’t waste their time teaching them reading and writing, they spend their time teaching them the WORD.” Uhh…
I should have said, as bad as Mississippi schools may be, in comparison to Maryland schools, they’re a bargain.
"Wait a minute. The comparison should be: 75.5% Miss statewide, 85% Maryland statewide
Which indicates that citizens of Mississippi are not getting a “bargain,” they get what they pay for.
Same for Louisiana at 73%"
Even if your statistics are correct, Maryland is paying greater than 50% per student over Mississippi. So if graduation rates are what counts, then they really aren’t getting 50% more for their money.
However, what does it take to graduate? Just showing up for class? Or teachers passing you, just for existing?
That would seem to be an indictment of the political leaders in Baltimore as well.
I’m more familiar with DC, where there was a massive flight to the suburbs of the black middle class following the 1968 riots in Columbia Heights and U Street. That turned stable solid African American neighborhoods into bombed out war zones that weren’t rebuilt for decades. I suspect the same occurred in Baltimore. The “black flight” was more devastating to contemporary cities and probably a contributor to some of the socio-economic issues. White flight in places like DC occurred in the 1950s, more like 60+ years ago. Maybe we should blame Ike?