On Tuesday, Bob Herbert wrote about the 100,000 Americans who have been murdered on our soil since 2001.
On Saturday in Newark, three young friends whose lives and dreams
vanished in a nightmarish eruption of gunfire in a rundown schoolyard
were buried…It has been almost six years since the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, when the nation’s consciousness of terror was yanked to new
heights. In those six years, nearly 100,000 people — an incredible
number — have been murdered in the United States.No heightening
of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to
do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly
bothered to notice.
At the same time that we’re diligently
confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we’re handing
over guns and bullets by the trainload to yahoos bent on blowing others
into eternity in armed robberies, drug-dealing, gang violence, domestic
assaults and other criminal acts.
Herbert was just on the Early Show describing this phenomenon to Harry Smith. They visited the make-shift memorial in front of the school in Newark where three kids were killed execution style.
Smith asks Herbert how he would explain the new rash of violence crime by urban kids. And Herbert says parenting. He said that the fathers are gone and the mothers are largely gone, as well, working two or three jobs or sucked into their own vortex of drug use. I think that the left and the right are coming together on the importance of parenting.
I wish Smith had asked a follow up question to Herbert about how parenting could be improved.
My answer would be that government should help those single working moms. Provide them with one decent job with health benefits that enable them to come home at a reasonable time to watch the kids. Chase down those deadbeat dads. Teach parenting lessons in high school.
Apt. 11d 
Godinez is 24. Carranza is 28. I realize that the group that committed the murder included a number of teenagers, but still, the Newark case isn’t the best possible example of “a new rash of violent crime by urban kids.”
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Carranza had also previously been charged with sexually assaulting a five-year-old and threatening her parents, at least according to a Fox news piece that I was looking at.
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It doesn’t really change anyone’s conclusions based on how old the folks are, does it? Bad parenting is presumably a problem precisely ’cause it can have effects far into the future.
I do find it a bit odd that it’s now become acceptable again to blaming moms for adult deviant behavior.
Laura: How is your parenting improvement plan different from “welfare” as we used to know it? Is it that the single moms are required to spend 6 hours a day (when their kids are in school?) at a place of work? And then, that mom is going to become an effective parent who can mitigate any other societal influences so her son can grow up to be an upstanding citizen?
I think it’s ridiculous to blame “parenting” for this kind of behavior. I don’t think it’s crazy to blame unacceptable childhood environments, but that’s not the same as parenting.
bj
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Well, parenting means different things for liberals and conservatives. For conservatives, you can be a good parent by having good values. For liberals, you can only be a good parent if society lets you be a good parent. It is a huge problem in these communities (though certainly not the only one) that there are no adults present – the women are working and the men are gone. I think we can point that out without blaming women. I blame welfare reform laws.
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Laura,
I think your distinction between conservative and liberal parent is not quite right. For social conservatives, society matters. Hence concerns about what’s on TV, what’s on the grocery store checkstand, etc, and hence efforts to create a counterculture bubble to shield children from the more putrid elements of mainstream culture.
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My answer wouldn’t be to fix parenting – but to fix child poverty. I think if ANY of us were in the midst of danger and drugs and didn’t have jobs or enough to eat….well, we might not be the best parents.
I realize that it is very easy to write “fix child poverty” and it a very complicated thing to actually DO it.
I also think that birth control should be free and easily accessible to all women…but that’s another subject for another day.
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Speaking of child poverty, there is a wonderful book by Kay Hymowitz called “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.” I’ll try to reproduce a few of her points from memory (my books aren’t unpacked yet), so accuracy is not guaranteed, although the basic outline is correct. Here it goes:
1. There was an initial surge in divorce across all classes in the initial period when single parenting and divorce were trendy. However, a couple decades later, the middle class and upper middle class wised up and realized that single motherhood was a drag, divorce ruinously expensive, and that piloting middle-class children successfully to adulthood was a task requiring the efforts of two highly committed grown-ups working closely together. Unfortunately, a marriage gap has opened up between the non-middle class and the middle class, and it is a major driver for child poverty.
2. The middle class lives by a script. You go to school, you work, you get married, you have kids, and you do this in that order and no other. Hymowitz argues that the poor lack this script, and that hence their lives and families are often chaotic. It’s much easier to parent having first secured a husband, and it’s much easier to study without dealing with the demands of small children, etc.
I think “education” is not a cure-all (talk to anybody who is working to lessen the incidence of college students binge drinking and then needing to be taking to the hospital because they’ve gone too far), but there is an obvious role for society at large in spreading information about the effects of marriage, divorce, and single parenthood. I suppose it would be incredibly un-PC, but things have to start there.
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