Problem Solving

I caught this on the Best of the Web yesterday.

Crime is back in New Orleans, even though the city's population is less than half what it was before Hurricane Katrina, Reuters reports:

The larger problem is that New Orleans has too many social problems--drugs, poverty, broken families, poor education--all present before Katrina.

A recent murder encapsulated the difficulties. After a 17-year-old was beaten up, his mother gave him a gun and told him to get revenge, and he killed the boy he fought with.

When police went to his home to investigate, they found the mother with cocaine and a family photo on display of the son with a gun in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other.

"For us to correct this, we have to look at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is our education system," Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in an interview.

So let me get this straight, Mom gives Jr. a gun to kill someone and somehow it's the education system not doing it's job.

Do you want to know why inner cities around the country cannot correct their problems. Maybe because they spend to many resources fixing problems that don't exist.

Seriously, did you learn from the education system that if someone beats you up it's not OK to take a gun from your mother and go cap the guy?

Our education system in inner cities has a lot to be desired, but I'm pretty sure that not even Harvard grads were taught to not kill people.

This is why cities will never improve because no one has the guts or the smarts to identify the real problems. Subsequently, if you are so inept you can't even identify the problem or do not have the backbone to publicly state what the problem actually is, how can you possibly solve it.