The rancid Chicago Public School (CPS) system did not pull the trigger any more than his loving and probably wonderful single-parent mom, but 14-year old Danny Gilmour is fighting for his life today after being shot on west Chicago Avenue. The national slaughter of innocents, almost always black and Latino, is the price we knowingly pay for pretend school reform and non-judgmental silence about the self-destructive nature of unwed child birth. Love and good intentions won’t bring Danny back any more than our continual celebration of political correctness. Indeed the misplacing of these attributes will doubtless precipitate more random homicides. It is typically the children of single mothers and the attendees or former attendees in Chicago’s awful schools that shoot, club, and knife, other children. This should be clear by now. That is why getting your kid into a selective-enrollment school is so critical in this town. You gotta protect your kid from the riff-raff.
Danny was shot three times by riff-raff while walking to Douglas Academy High School on the west side. This doesn’t surprise me, nor does it surprise you; it happens three dozen times every school year. Furthermore you know in the depths of your rational soul that providing a haven for teen-age, unwed mothers builds a nesting ground for future shooters, and young corpses. Were bad schools and ‘unfamilies’ not a matter of life and death, I could also turn a blind eye to reality and become another fool in a long list of societal apologists. But I will not do that, the field is crowded enough with those afraid to speak the truth. My house is nearly empty.
Chicago and other urban villages have two intransigent juvenile problems: one, we are being eaten by our own young, and two, the public schools in our villages produce more idiots than God-Fearing Citizens. That’s right, God-Fearing. I wrote the liberal’s most-feared noun, God. In the absence of the nuclear, two-parent family so essential for raising a child in our complex and competitive economic system, we threw God out of the schools at the same time our city politicians decided to glorify fatherless homes by sanctifying the woman who decides to bear children in the absence of a father.
We are dealing with life and death here, so let's cut the bullfrog and say what we mean. God is unwelcome in our social system because God is judgmental, and the forces in control of our media outlets, Television, Hollywood movies, and tree-hugger radio cannot countenance a society that makes judgment on their sexual preference. In order for this element to be accepted as normal, religion has to ridiculed, undermined, and ignored. Where does this fit in education? The same mindset that is trying to tell us that men sleeping with men, or that women sleeping with other women is just a life choice that only disturbs knuckle-draggers and fascists, are also glorifying the plight of the plucky teen-aged mom who uses her body to bear children with no last names. These dynamics are linked, and whereas the detriment to the gay community is measured by the number of joint 401(K) plans that end up in probate, the measure of the impact of fatherless boys is a juvenile body count.
Today, south and west side Chicago is under siege by these fatherless children. Gang life and the ‘gansta’ lifestyle, illustrated endlessly on rap videos, is more attractive to these bad seeds than the weak gravitational pull of higher education or vocational skill. These very mothers who tap the public coffers after popping out bastard children, are afraid to come out of their project homes and go to the store for a loaf of bread for fear of being raped, robbed, or ravished by someone else’s bastard offspring. In our collective wisdom we have blown up these housing projects, like the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, or the infamous Cabrini-Green reservation, and scattered our cultural misfits to the four winds; well two winds, the nearby south and western suburbs.
Danny was gunned down leas than a four-minute walk from liberal, love-a-duck, Oak Park. Are we to pretend that Oak Parkers do not fear the progengy of welfare systems past? If they don’t, why is free access to the side streets of Oak Park blocked by concrete curbing? Fear the child but honor the immoral mother, the logic is self-defeating. How long can we continue living in this delusion?
More importantly how much longer will we continue to blame struggling school teachers for their inability to teach to the unwilling or to manage violence-prone children. The urban schools need special instructors to cope with this madness, not more clever ways of measuring it.
And even if the embattled systems in L.A., D.C., Cleveland, New York, and Miami were to find the magic lesson plan that could penetrate decades of cultural malaise, the rate at which unwed mothers produce fatherless children and all of the social problems that usually come with them, would still overwhel our capacity to teach them.
Step one: Face facts.
Step two: Go back to step one
Comments
Your article appears to blame single parenthood. There are as many idiot children coming out of double parented households. Idiocy is idiocy whether single or double parented families. There are other variables that are not addressed here. What factors are added to the single mother family? drugs? lack of education? idiot boyfriends who have probably been to prison? several daddies in the same family? abused women? illiterates? Could these mothers be plagued by a number of issues? I think there is more to the story of the single mother than just being single. More depth is needed to this perspective.
Variables, perspectives? If venemous snakes wear green socks, and I see a low-slithering thing wearing them; I act. I don't need to contemplate any other aspect of the danger, and searching for one when I should be killing the snake will get me killed. The boy-children of single-parent moms are 68% of our prison population, pretty-much 100% of our gang culture, and the lion's share of our intractable school discipline problems. Furthermore, the girl-children of these mothers are inclined to replicate the very cycle of life that is destroying them. Are there variables, sure just like there are variables to surviving in the wild, but while you are concentrating on face-saving variables, the snake is going to take you down. Focus on the snake, and damn the variables, they are merely a distraction to keep us from solving the real problem because we are afraid to offend the offender. Again,I don't need to add my voice to that already overcrowded field of bed-wetting apologists. Out.
Superficial treatment of the problem. The snake has a culture from which it slithers.
Hello again, Mr. Hayes. Here is where I really like you! You speak the truth. One thing you forgot to mention and this is for Alice, it is not so much single parenthood as it is single parenthood at 13, 14, 15...years of age (more or less). These children do not know how to take care of children. This is the cycle that is replecating.
"More importantly how much longer will we continue to blame struggling school teachers for their inability to teach to the unwilling or to manage violence-prone children. The urban schools need special instructors to cope with this madness, not more clever ways of measuring it." This hits the nail on the head as well. Teachers can only do so much with the scant 45 minutes (high school) we see our kids per day. As I am a reading specialist, I am doing my very best to encourage and build my students confidence. It is very difficult because they see it as a weakness.
I am trying! I love my students and I believe each and every one of them are awesome.
Edward,
Thank you for this article and your perspective. You are correct that denying God and the accompanying moral values is part of the root of the problem. One of those moral values is respect--respect for life, family, self, personhood. There is no need for this value if we are not created in the image of God--there is no right and wrong, and people can basically do what they think is right. I sincerely doubt there would be many unwed girls bearing children if the males were taught to honor God, women, marriage and family, and themselves as protectors.
Of course, it goes both ways. Girls who grow up in families that love and nurture them and teach them to embrace the same values will not be as likely to seek out sexual relationships or be victimized by them.
True, the statistics are stacked against the less-privileged all the way around. It is, however, a societal issue on a deeper level. The media never lets up with glorifying out-of-wedlock sex and treatment of wom
oops--word limit
treatment of women as objects. A day doesn't seem to go by without another headline showing the sexual misconduct of the rich and famous and supposed "role models" of our land. They just have more options for covering up their misbehavior. Unfortunately, sometimes those who say they abide by God's values wind up in the news for the same reasons.
I think the problems of the Chicago schools and other schools will continue to multiply until we as a nation realize how morally bankrupt we have become, and decide on an individual basis that we each have the opportunity to make a difference by returning to fearing God and living accordingly.
He was shot on his way to school. Your article seems to infer that if he were walking to the grocery store he would not have been shot. "Danny was shot three times by riff-raff while walking to Douglas Academy High School on the west side." The key here is "west side", not "public school". Public schools are not limited to the west side, nor Chicago for that matter. This behavior is NOT the fault of the schools, but reflects the upbringing of the students. Education and child development begins in the home. It's not the school's responsibility to raise or police your children. It's the parents and the community's.
It's easy to place blame on the schools, but difficult, and unpopular, to blame the people who are actually responsible. Responsible journalism wouldn't shirk it's responsibility and absolve the guilty. Stop using the school's as scapegoats for your community ills. There are public schools everywhere and they are a reflection of the students, not the other way around.
BTW. I was raised by a single parent and have several friends that were as well. While it may have been a handicap in some ways , it in no way led to any such behavior as you describe. That is just more scapegoating. Dignity, respect, integrity & purpose are all taught/learned in the home, regardless of the amount of parents in the home.
I am a college student. I attend a city college with students of ethnic and economic diversity. The students getting bad grades are the students who are unmotivated. These students regularly miss class, spend lecture time texting on their phones or listening to music. The point I'm making is these students invariably are from a certain race, which I'll allow you and the reader to supply. This malaise doesn't appear overnight. It is a continuation of their upbringing where personal responsibility and accountability is missing.
If the schools were to blame, there would be NO successful students, and clearly that is not the case.
God is becoming increasingly unwelcome because gods are a creation of our human egos. That's why there are so many gods and religions. I am atheist. Morals are not lost on me because I am atheist. Your belief reminds me of Rafiq al Shabazz, a character in Obama's book Dreams of My Father. Rafiq believed the Nation of Islam was the cure to the community's ills. Obama disagreed and so do I regarding religion on the whole.
In closing, we are responsible for ourselves and our progeny. No one else is.
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