problem is, when someone's friends are in gangs and do drugs, and this is the world you are in every day, few people in their teenage years have enough wisdom to realize that school can be a solution, plus it can be hard to believe from that pov. you can't really blame a 50 year old for making poor decisions when he was 16

if this is in response to dougl, then i would +1 this.

but i also want to bring up the point that i think dougl's friends success isn't entirely attributed to simply reaping the rewards of good decision making.

our societal structure only revolves around the idea of equality. while we give unknowing tacit consent to the social contract of our society, our laws, ethics, morals, etc. aren't very good at making the playing field equal.

thus the societal environment in which someone is born could allow different people in different environments access to different classes of opportunities upon which decision making is positively/negatively "rewarded."

if a kid grows up in a poverty stricken area and his only options are to either sell crack rock or develop a wicked jump shot, and falls short of doing both, he's a failure. but is he a failure because of his "poor" decision making with what limited opportunity was available or did the system/society/sub-society/environment determine that the odds of him failing was extremely high to begin with?

however, to say that our success/failure is solely attributed to the environment in which we are immersed, and that our behaviors are solely determined by our environment, pretty much absolves us from the notion of responsibility over voluntary actions. so in a way, i suppose that we feel as if we have the ability to choose our actions but our actions are limited to what is available in our environment...

edit: this goes out to cole and his idea of if everyone stopped killing each other, smoking crack and joining gangs, we'll all be ok.

Sigh, I used to think this way too. While it is certainly possible for these kids to go to college and achieve success, the deck is totally stacked against them. Their parents place no value on education, they go the worst schools with the worst teachers, and there are low expectations. Where college and even post-grad degrees were expected by my family and probably many of yours, these kids parents don't even expect high school graduation. The culture is totally different. "Equal opportunity" is BS. If you believe all kids actually have an equal opportunity for success then you would also have to believe that minorities are genetically inferior because a lower percentage end up achieving "success".

nah i also graduated in '90

I don't know if I think we'll all be okay. Nor do I want everyone to be okay. I think the natural lottery has a lot to do with how successful someone is.

Well yeah...duh. That's why I said I'm making it sound much easier than it actually is.

I think 'Precious' paints a pretty good picture of the adversity some of these kids are facing.

i bet you're one of those *******s with those vinyl stickers on the back of your SUV that shows stick figures of you, your wife, your kids, and your pets

lol

Ban for racist comments!!!

89 here...Where is Abso when you need him. I am not sure how old Doug is though. He could be 50...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oU_F0yS-Bo

I've always wondered who is actually banging the decoy girls behind closed doors and whether or not they make the decoy girls dress up as the decoy in some sort of sick roleplaying thing in the bedroom.

i haven't seen the movie but i reckon that being a young, urban minority and a female in a society dominated by mostly white men is a double dose of ****editude.

i was paraphrasing biggie smalls, the street poet.

this x 100

due to the deck being stacked so severely against them to start out, the focus for many of these individuals is simply on survival, not achievement

this is partly why, as much of a prick as I am online for fun, I try to remain as humble as I can. I'm a semi-affluent white dude who drew a good hand in life. But just cuz I won the "stork dropped me off at the right house" lottery, that doesn't make me any better than the dude who got dropped off at the ghetto on the doorstep of 2 crack addicts.

well said

It's not decoys, its asian blow up dolls!

-Eh, It might feel random from your perspective, but your parents weren't trading babies at the hospital.

-The deck is stacked against poor city folk almost entirely because of the drug war.

-I don't think Cole has seen The Wire yet.

This is taken from the link here which claims to be based on FBI statistics. Based on this data (believe it or not as you will) is that the 1980s and 1990s were much more "dangerous" than the current time. We live in a time that is as safe as or safer the idylic 1970s, but you hear so many people terrified to leave the house or let their kids do the same.

I'm certain that living in a yuppie neighborhood has a lot to do with the people I know. Still, people here are terrified of crime. It is the irony of the present age, imo. Their parents didn't lock their doors in 1972...

She said she was 16 but I knew she was 20. Chicks lie about that stuff all the time!

It's random in the sense that each infant has no control over the parents and the environment they're going to grow up in. None whatsoever.

And yes, I do believe the drug war does more harm than good.

You don't have any control over it, but the only opportunity you had at life was between your two parents. And your parents (or grandparents) worked hard and were smart enough to give better lives to their kids.

Problem with poverty today is that the best opportunities for success in the ghetto are in drug sales, which royally screws up the communities in a variety of ways. If you took the Irish ghetto your grandparents lived in and presented an extremely lucrative business opportunity that landed half the males dead or in jail, they'd never have made it out.

not sure if you've read freakanomics but take a look at when roe vs wade was passed.

roe v wade was passed about 15-20 years before the crime rate started to drop....right around the age when teenagers would start getting into some serious ****.

other states allowed abortion prior to roe v wade and their crime rates dropped in similar time lines - that is earlier than it did nationally. similar things have occurred in romania as well.

edit: if you want to see where i'm going with this, which kid do you think is more likely to fall into a life of crime? the poor kid who was born despite the mother not wanting to have the kid and possibly not being able to provide good care for the kid? or the rich kid who was born despite the mother not wanting to have the kid while having the means to provide good care for the kid?

of the two mothers, prior to roe v wade, which do you think would be able to come up with the means of having an abortion? the rich mother, or the poor mother?

not saying that the two, abortion and crime are directly related, but the relationship between the two is interesting to think about.
also, the blip around 85 might be related to the crack epidemic but i'm not exactly sure.

The opposite occurred in Romania, where families where offered incentives to have more children. Only the poor people took it and 15-20 years down the line there was a huge crime surge.

in the 60s, ceaucescu wanted to increase the population of romania for reasons i can't recall. ceaucescu abolished abortion and made all forms of contraception and sex education illegal. population surged, and crime rates started to increase in the time frame just as you stated.

when ceacescu lost power in the late 80s, romanian crime rates started to drop in the early 2000s.