I am Charles

Terror haunts the streets of our cities. Since 2008, more than 530 young people have been killed in Chicago. Almost four-fifths of these killings were in 22 African-American and Latino community areas on the city’s South and Southwest sides.

Each year, across the country, about 7,000 African Americans are murdered, more than nine times out of 10 by other African Americans. Far more African Americans are killed on our streets than on foreign battlefields. If a foreign foe took these lives, we would mobilize armies and armadas to stop them. But here, because much of this violence is contained in racially concentrated neighborhoods, there is too much resignation and too little outrage.

We know the roots of this violence. The poor are crowded into desperate neighborhoods. Joblessness produces despair, depression and hopelessness. Drugs and guns spread in the underground economy. Gangs start warring on mean streets. The young go to the poorest schools. They are more likely to be suspended, less likely to graduate. They face the worst job market since the Great Depression.

We know where the guns come from. There are no gun manufacturers or gun shops in Chicago. If we knew the location of a terrorist base providing weapons to kill U.S. soldiers, we would take it out with a drone attack. No one wants drones used here at home, but that’s no reason to ignore the problem.

Chicago knows how to protect people when it has adequate resources. When NATO came to town, the police secured the streets and protected the guests. Historically, when the violence heads uptown, the police react faster and investigate more thoroughly. More police have been dispatched to neighborhoods where the murders have spiked, but citizens there still aren’t protected as well as our guests or uptown businesses are.

In his poem, “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats writes of a time when “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the face of this violence, our society seems to lack conviction. Social permissiveness allows the vulnerable to remain unprotected by law. Mass unemployment threatens to become a normal condition. Starving schools of resources is a budgetary item.

And the worst are full of passionate intensity. The National Rifle Association and its lobbies push to weaken gun laws, to free gun stores from responsibility, to block the ability of our municipalities to crack down on the gun flow.

Making our neighborhoods safe won’t be easy. We must target the areas that suffer the most pain, and put young people to work. We need to provide the young with the best, not the worst, educational opportunities. We need the police to make protecting the citizens of those streets a greater priority. We need to crack down on the flow of drugs and guns.

This won’t start from the mayor’s office or the police department. Change will come only when victims demand it. People whose backs are against the wall can imitate the violence of the broader society or they can adjust to it or they can resist. They must resist. In Chicago, many courageous community groups and churches have taken up this cause. We must march on the gun sellers and challenge the gangs. We must march to demand jobs.

One of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms is the Freedom from Fear. Violence on our streets tramples a basic human right. Responding requires all the energy and invention that we used in the civil rights movement — from litigation to demonstration, from nonviolent protest to the power of the vote.

We must have for our youth more graduations and fewer funerals. We must choose life over death. We choose nonviolence not because we are scared, but because we are wise. And it is transformative.

We must make the unspeakable unacceptable again.

(Source: mohandasgandhi)

mohandasgandhi:

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author.

“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.

The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.

The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians, the authors argue. Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals. People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront, the authors write.

(Continue reading…)

Shocker. Is anyone really surprised?