Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Chaerophon]

Not all poor are homogenously violent, criminally inclined, et cetera. That is what Drasca has been trying, with apparent lack of success, to get across.

Within the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder are poor but proud, the sort who simply don't commit crime, along with the poor, desparate, and irresponsible.

Occhi,

You are absolutely right, and I would never disagree with that point (although at times my language might have suggested otherwise. Of course, that does seem a fairly obvious point, and is one which I think my past posts have shown I would be likely to recognize). However, the children of those poor choosers don't have much of a chance. What Doc seems to have had in his favour was an upbringing that, at some point, inculcated him with values that served him well later in life. To what degree can one fault the child of delinquent or drug-addicted parents for her/his future despair? You certainly can't lay it all at their feet; we're talking about deep psychological issues here that cannot be corrected by throwing such folks under the bus.

One of the most eye-opening experiences of my life actually took place in an "Intro. to Canadian Politics" class about five years ago. I was taking the class in the summer, and on a "minor" campus in another town. The campus happened to sit right next to an indian reservation, and there were about seven members of the local Sto:lo tribe in my class. I probably learned more in those classes than anywhere since. They were all incredibly open about their pasts - I think that for some of them, it was therapeutic. Nearly all of them had been taken away from their parents at a young age, and placed in a residential school in the '60's. One of them was actually the last person to spend the night in a residential school in all of Canada.

What was amazing, was that, in spite of all of the pain that being ripped from their parents' arms had caused, this man's last night had been spent alone: he had broken back in, afraid to go home. They all expressed the same sentiment; despite the fact that some of them had been raped at the school and some had been beaten for speaking their native language (these were horrible places), what they feared even more was the hopelessness and despair that they would face on returning to society. None of their parents knew how to be parents: they, too, had been raised in the residential schools, as had their parents before them. Alcoholism, crime, and child abuse were often the result. This was a systemic cycle.

My intention is not to make any of the generalizations about "poor" people that you are suggesting. At some point, personal responsibility does have a role to play. Nonetheless, in the ghetto and similar places where similar (if not quite so extreme) systemic cycles do exist, and children are the victims (who then grow up to become parents...the cycle continues), it is hard to place all of the blame at the feet of generic "miscreants" who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We're not talking about small obstacles here, and some people might need (and, as human beings, deserve) a hand up. They're not responsible for the situation into which they were born, any more than their parents were. Even if the adult population has already "made their bed", we owe it to the youth to try to improve their chances in the face of overwhelming odds.

Doing it the hard way may be noble; however, you lose a lot of potentially good people along the way if you rely on the ability of all people to have that kind of fortitude.