This Ain’t Chicago – It’s China

Over the past 3 years or so the City of Chicago has been roiled by a series of shootings of school children by school children. 36 Dead in the 2009 School year, and over 500 injured by violence in the last 2 years. That faction of black conservatives who eek their living pimping black depravity publically experiencing serial orgasms as each new report of a shooting or beat down has come in from police reports providing fresh fodder for their tawdry warez spewed across the Internet and pages of conservative rags operating like hourly hotel rooms on the sin strip of any big city are breathless with anticipation.

There indeed is a problem in Chicago, a serious one shared by far too many urban environments where a culture of violence and guns in the poor, mostly urban black communities (although poor, urban Hispanic communities aren’t far behind in reality). And the purpose of this blog isn’t to minimize those problems. The issue is the context. I mean, this is America – and like Mom and Apple Pie, one of our core shared beliefs is that each and every problem has a solution. Depending on whether you are right or left in your political belief system, those solutions might involve grabbing the bootstraps in self-help, morality, or the application of money…

The first law of computing is … Garbage In – Garbage Out (GIGO). Ergo, automating something doesn’t fix anything that was inherently wrong to begin with (garbage) – it just spits it (garbage) out the other end faster. It is one of the reasons I believe the CRM Systems many companies in the US have fawned all over themselves in adopting as efficiency tools, and methods to address customers are so pathetically disconnected from the very customers they seek to manipulate. “Re-probleming”… Indeed.

Garbage In – in this case is the manufactured proxy that this violence is a “black problem”.

It isn’t – it is an AMERICAN Problem. While it may be more psycho-sexually gratifying in the case of conservatives to point out it’s “their problem” (Dem black folks, or Dem Hispanic folks), and thus score points for whiteness; guilt assuaging – “it’s not MY kids”; or in the Liberal belief set ‘There’s an Ap for that!” – the real issue is we’ve been heading for a train wreck since Ronnie Raygun Rambo-ized America with Hollywood’s full profit minded acquiescence.

Garbage out – is the belief system foisted by intentional or unintentional mis-identification of the problem, is that there is a solution wholly and singularly within the context of the black community (or Hispanic Community. Asian folks get a walk on this one, because of the strange dichotomy between highly visible “good Asians”, and surreptitiously invisible “bad Asians”. It’s a bear being a “Model Minority”.)…

There isn’t.

Oh… China?

Recent violent attacks at schools in China

China has seen a slew of recent assaults at schools. Many have been blamed on personal grudges or people with psychiatric problems:

_ May 12, 2010: A man with a cleaver hacks seven children and two adults to death at a kindergarten in Hanzhong city in Shaanxi province. He then kills himself.

_ April 30, 2010: A farmer attacks and wounds five kindergarten students with a hammer in Shandong province’s Weifang city before burning himself to death. The man also strikes a teacher. None of the children has life-threatening injuries.

_ April 29, 2010: A 47-year-old unemployed man attacks 4-year-olds in a kindergarten in Jiangsu province, wounding 29 of them. Two teachers and a security guard are also hurt.

_ April 28, 2010: A teacher on sick leave due to mental illness breaks into a primary school in Leizhou city in Guangdong province in southern China and stabs 18 students and a teacher.

_ April 12, 2010: Yang Jiaqin, 40, hacks to death a second grader and an elderly woman near an elementary school in Xizhen village of the southern Guangxi region. Yang’s family was scheduled the next day to send him to a hospital for psychological treatment for a mood disorder.

_ March 23, 2010: Zheng Minsheng, 42, kills eight children in a knife attack at the Nanping Experimental Elementary School in south China’s Fujian province. Zheng is executed April 28.