I live about 45 minutes west of downtown Baltimore. I have extended family who live in the city. The riots are very disturbing to me.
First, of those you see in the news, nearly everyone has an interest or a bias. I don't put much credence in what most of them say. In fact, aside of the Coroner's Report there are very few accounts worth believing. I will be interested to see what comes out in court.
Second, if you think these riots have anything to do with Freddie Gray, I would like to sell you the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge has already been spoken for. There seems to be a contingent of people who follow peaceful but sizable political movements and use it as a context for uncivil behavior. We saw this with Occupy Wall Street, with Ferguson, and now with Baltimore. I'm not sure I understand what the movement in Ferguson was all about, but OWS and Baltimore started with legitimate concerns.
Like most, I am bothered about what happened to Mr. Gray. I don't care what his rap sheet looked like. I care that he was arrested for reasons that are not clear, that he was severely injured, and then that the police did so little to check and care for his condition. If there was wrong doing, I want it prosecuted. I say this not as any particular activist, but as a right-of-center Republican voter. I expect the police to act with the utmost professionalism. We give them great latitude to enforce the laws and in return I expect them to adhere to their oath to the Constitution.
Third, I am appalled by allegations that the mayor decided to let the rioting crowd continue while telling police to stand down. If this is true, Mayor Blake's career is finished. On the other hand, the police did do some things right. Keeping everyone inside Camden Yards baseball stadium while police took control of the situation was a wise move. Imagine the confrontation if 15000 people, trying to get away, fought with 1500 intent on mayhem. Things could have been very much worse than they turned out to be.
On a larger societal level, we have the slums of West Baltimore. Baltimore has been the recipient of incredible amounts of social welfare money over the years, and yet it only seems to perpetuate poverty. We keep feeding into this system and it continues to fail us. I'd happily spend all that money and more, if I thought it was helping people to get out of that situation, but I don't think that's the case.
Instead we have neighborhoods of broken families, generations of absent, imprisoned fathers, and mothers who are too busy or distracted to raise their children. Honestly, raising a child on your own is extremely difficult. It can be done, but it takes an extraordinary person and a helpful community. You won't find a whole lot of that going on in West Baltimore.
And so we ponder what just happened. This is more than just a rant about Freddie Gray's death. There is something much deeper going on here. Something that no amount of policing can fix. It is the poverty of the mind. On forums like this we often see people mock sky-God religions. However, this is a straw man argument. While the confusion between religion and science is commonplace among the ignorant, if you talk to religious authorities you will find that, aside of fundamentalists, most do not see any such contradiction.
Instead they seek to lead and teach people morality. This is something the State can not do. The reason so many fathers are absent is because they don't feel any sense of obligation or moral duty. The reason why crime is so commonplace is because without morality the equation becomes, "what can you get away with?" Unless one is of a religious institution, it is considered to be very impolite to teach such morality. But that's where things have to start. It is time to try some heavy duty evangelism.