Re: Express lane Discrimination?
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Cry me a river if your dad drinks and mom is a crack head, if your life is that bad then take steps to change it.
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This is great. How many kids have you met whose moms are crackheads and dads are drunk? I have met a lot of them. What exactly would you like for a seven year old kid to do when he is being raped repeatedly by his mother's boyfriend, after being born with severe cognitive delays due to her drug use while he was in the womb? Educate himself and get a leg up in the world? Pull himself up by his bootstraps.
Guess what I did today? I went around collecting case files on about 30 of the most mentally ill kids I have ever seen in my life. These are the kids who you are telling to get over it and stop making excuses. 24 of 30 were in foster care by the age of 4 because their parents either abandoned them, showed up in the emergency room high on crack to give birth to them, or beat them with belts and electrical cords for years on end. 29 of the 30 kids have multiple mental health diagnoses related to being sexually abused, malnourished, neglected or born + for cocaine. Several are already sex offenders before the age of 14, after being raped themselves before they were old enough to spell the word.
And these are just a few of the kids who made it into care. There are literally thousands more kids in every borough in NYC right now having the same experience, and many of them will not receive any help from anyone. These are tomorrow's criminals, chronic homeless and drug dealers. They have literally no chance to do the things you talked about, because even if they were miraculously able to overcome years of neglect resulting in major developmental delays, the schools in their neighborhoods are poorly funded, poorly run and overcrowded with other kids like them. So good luck with the whole 'if you are educated' part of your post.
People who think that inner city poverty and cycles of crime and violence can be attributed to the unwillingness of people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are laughably ignorant.
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