Did the diary title startle you? Its from Bob Herbert today.
Whether it’s Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, South-Central Los Angeles, Camden, N.J. — take your pick — we’ve looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming, life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise.
We’re having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America’s third-largest city.
Dozens of boys and girls of school-age and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. One hundred were killed there last year, according to the police. The blood of the young is spattered daily on the stoops, sidewalks and streets of American cities from coast to coast, and we won’t even take notice...
This kind of thing simply blows my mind...100 children murdered in Chicago last year. That's just one city. I wonder what the numbers would look like if we included NYC, LA, Detroit, New Orleans...
Certainly I care about what happens in Afghanistan. But I also have to wonder why we see hundreds of diaries here and around the internet focused on either giving Obama advice about what to do or criticizing what he's doing about that particular war...all while we almost never hear a peep about the hundreds of children who are being killed right here at home in a war zone that we pretend doesn't exist because its confined to black and brown children in our urban areas.
I work with a young African American man who grew up in pre-Katrina New Orleans and left there to attend college (on a basketball scholarship) at a small university in northern Minnesota. When I first met him, I asked him about why he traveled such a great distance - both in mileage and culture. His response stunned me. He said, "I looked around at my friends and family in New Orleans and knew that if I was going to survive, I had to get out of there. So I took the one and only chance I had."
Ever since I heard that story a few years ago, I have thought of this young man as a war refugee - just like those in this community who have come here from Laos or Somalia or other locations. He was willing to give up home, family, culture and roots to get away from the killing and the violence (of both soul and body). So is this the best our country has to offer children growing up in a war zone right here in the US of A?
I know that making our urban areas into safe places where children can thrive will not be an easy task nor does it lend itself to simple solutions. But it drives me crazy that this issue is not even on the agenda for most progressives, much less Democrats. If someone can explain to me why that is...I'm all ears.