Saturday, June 14, 2008

Shock as Liberal Social Engineers Fail Again

Now online - Hanna Rosin's Atlantic Monthly article on the not unpredictable fallout of a celebrated social engineering project to tear down inner city slums and disperse the residents throughout the suburbs, as the cultural pathologies of the inner city dwellers were asssumed by liberal do-gooders to be a byproduct of their ghetto environment, rather than the ghetto environment having been created because of the cultural pathologies of its occupants:
To get to the Old Allen police station in North Memphis, you have to drive all the way to the end of a quiet suburban road until it turns country. Hidden by six acres of woods, the station seems to be the kind of place that might concern itself mainly with lost dogs, or maybe the misuse of hunting licenses. But it isn’t. Not anymore. As Lieutenant Doug Barnes waited for me to arrive one night for a tour of his beat, he had a smoke and listened for shots. He counted eight, none meant for buck. “Nothing unusual for a Tuesday,” he told me.

Barnes is white, middle-aged, and, like many veteran cops, looks powerful without being fit. He grew up four miles from the station during the 1960s, he said, back when middle-class whites lived peacefully alongside both city elites and working-class African Americans. After the 1968 riots, Barnes’s father taught him the word curfew and reminded him to lock the doors. Still, the place remained, until about 10 years ago, a pretty safe neighborhood where you could play outside with a ball or a dog. But as he considered more-recent times, his nostalgia gave way to something darker. “I have never been so disheartened,” he said.
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