Random Review of the Week: The Lincoln Lawyer

Over the last week, I have been reading an exceptional book by author Michael Connelly.  The Lincoln Lawyer is part of the Mickey Haller series, about a defense attorney with questionable morals and ethics who defends his clients, not by presenting their innocence, but by putting the legal focus on the cracks in the case and making it fall apart.

Cover for the Michael Connelly novel The Lincoln Lawyer

This is the book that starts off the Mickey Haller series, with him getting what he calls a 'franchise' case.  A case that will pay him big money and allow him to maintain a higher lifestyle, giving him more publicity and making more money.  Mickey is a character that is all about the paycheck and whatever he has to do to get it.  To be reading about such an anti-hero persona as a main character is refreshing, since he is not overtly evil like some characters, but he isn't a overly great person to be with.

This case is a man named Louis Roulet (roolay), who is accused of battery, attempted rape and attempted murder of Regina Campos.  As the novel starts, it jumps around to show you the personality of Mickey, keeping Louis shrouded more and more until a surprising middle of the book reveal, where all the cards are laid down.

The characters are excellently written.  Everyone from Mickey, to Raul Levin, to Louis Roulet, Ted Minton, even Mickey's first ex-wife, Maggie McPhearson.  They're all incredibly well written characters with dialogue that stays on point with who they are.  What makes it even better is after seeing the trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation, with a decent imagination, you can see the actors fitting the parts perfectly.

Maggie McPhearson (Marisa Tomei) and Mickey Haller (Matthew McConaughey) in Four Green Fields Bar in The Lincoln Lawyer

The book has an great plot, written in a way to keep you intrigued by what Mickey will do next, not showing the reader the entire plan until it actually unfolds.  The story is told from Mickey's perspective, but at the same time doesn't allow the narrative to become completely omniscient, allowing the reader to take guesses and potshots at what is coming next.

Another good thing Connelly does is using current events of the period as a place in order to allow the reader to establish a time frame in which the story takes place, and intertwining locations around Los Angeles with both the Blake trial and the novel's story make the city seem like a minor character in the story, albeit indirectly.

The only complaint that I had with the story is that once we get to the trial, and everything is moving along in intensity, the book suddenly comes to a halt.  Not to say the conclusion was in any way bad, it worked.  It just came way too fast.  It's like the reader is going down a highway at 60 miles an hour and their speed is steadily climbing, then they floor the pedal and their car shoots to 200.  The story concluded well, but I just felt that the story could've taken a little more time to get there, built up the suspense and mystery behind things.

All in all, this is a wonderful book and a great start to a series.  With killer twists in the story, a nice shake-up in routine novel structure, and witty, interesting dialogue, readers won't be able to put it down until the final page has been read.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and others will as well.

Review:
4/5 stars.

A Failure in Parenting

I apologize for the late post, I promise that next week I will be posting on thursday. However, life got in the way of this post, so if this keeps happening, I may just change my scheduled days.

Back when I was growing up in the early nineties, I grew up in a suburb of St. Paul called Vadnais Heights. The town was small, small enough in fact, that the school district from White Bear Lake actually handled the education for our area. That's actually a lot of how the area was. Smaller towns that hadn't met the full force of development being engulfed by the expanding and developing town of White Bear Lake. Ironically enough, the same thing is happening in my current city of residence.

Manitou Station: White Bear Lake, MN

Now, when you're in a small town, certain things go unnoticed. Crime is almost non-existent. The most that occurs is a traffic ticket or a high school party. Politics are as simple as whether or not you've sat down for lunch with the candidate. Things are relatively calm and easy going. But, as with anything, times change, as do the circumstances of people and even cities themselves.

Take Detroit for example. For the longest time, Detroit, Michigan had been one of the largest manufacturing cities in the United States. The city was great, not without it's own share of problems, but great. Then, after two recessions, decades of ineptitude and corruption, the city fell, becoming a shadow of its former self. Only recently has it started to pick up again. And because of this, regardless of how things are picking up in the city, it affected the suburbs greatly as well.

This brings me to the topic today, of how a lot of parents today have failed to live up to their most important job title:

'Parent'

The reason I say this is something that eerily caught my eye over the weekend. Saturday afternoon, I was eating my dinner in Taco Bell before work started, when an ambulance pulled into the parking lot. I saw them, but didn't think anything of it. One of the EMTs walked into the restaurant, started to order. It just wasn't a big deal to me.

Just after this, a young kid walked up to me, asking me a simple question, “Do you like ambulances?”

I was stunned for a second, looking around the room at who was in the restaurant. None of the tables had any toys on them, nor did he have any portable gaming system in his hand. That said to me that he wasn't the child of any of the workers in the restaurant. He looked like he was about seven years old, and the only people in the Taco Bell besides me were a young couple that looked about twenty.

I only could think of one thing at the time, 'This child is here all by himself. Where in the hell are his parents?' After getting over my perplexity, I replied with a quick, “Yeah, sure, why not?”, and the boy went on his way. He opened the door for an older lady as she walked in, and I didn't see him after that.

Now, my parents never had a lot of money, but they still found a way to raise me until I was old enough and responsible enough to make it under my own power to do certain things. When I was seven years old, whether or not I felt that I was ready to venture to public places like that on my own, my parents would never allow it. I only went when they went with me, no ifs, ands, or buts.

At that point, if I wanted to go to my friend's house down the street, my mother would still watch to make sure I was safe. When I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart that had just opened up after I turned eight, she wouldn't let me go up there without her driving me. Sure, the area wasn't bad with crime, but you cannot put a price or time commitment on the safety of your own flesh and blood.

So, with this knowledge in hand of my own childhood, I could only question why this seven year old was here, all by himself. I was in a public place, right on the border of two cities, one of which is pretty bad given the area, and this child had no parents with him or supervision. It shocked me.

The fact remains that, given the current situation that we have in our society, I think that parents just have lost the time to think about what it truly means to be a parent. It's more than just putting a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. It's about giving children structure, about taking care of them, about showing them what they need to do to excel at what they want to do once they grow and mature.

But when you look around at a lot of places, it seems that this simple message has been forgotten. It becomes very apparent when you take a quick drive around the city in which I work, Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The city, like Detroit, was a thriving factory town. It had three different auto plants at one point. However, one of these has been closed, and another working at only 45% capacity in order to cut labor costs.

Because of this, the city is struggling. Many small businesses outside of the downtown area have been abandoned, burned out, or left fledging in out of date buildings that cannot make a safety inspection. Job opportunity is scarce in a place that is unable to afford even some of the most basic things. Crime has taken a major toll on the city, and a large portion of the city north of Highway 94 has become somewhat of a slum.

On top of that, the graduation rate for students in the Ypsilanti school district is 66.8% in 2007. This came with 26.7% Dropout Rate, leaving a full 6.5% unaccounted for. This means that at least one in four students in the city won't even graduate high school. Now, where do we place the blame for this?

Do we place it with the parents, who don't give the child structure and nurturing? Who let their child run free when they're younger so they have no control. Or can't face the fact that they have two jobs and let the child run their own lives except for finding adequate care for their child. Or do we blame the teachers, who are underpaid for their job so they just stop caring about what happens?

However, blame could also be placed on the child themselves, for not wanting to try and learn what the schools are teaching them. This is a three sided issue, one with various political motivations and gets down deeply into what it means to actually make a living in this world.

I remember one day when I was getting home from elementary school. My mother wasn't able to pick me up, so I had to ride the bus home. When I got off the bus, my neighbor from across the street picked me up right from the bus stop with a note signed by my mother. But these days, that doesn't happen. Kids come home and no parent is around because they have to work constantly to give them a roof over their head and food on the table.

Those type of parents at least take a bit of responsibility for their child, at least giving them a home. My guess is that in the end, these parents feel that there is no way out of their circumstances, and believe that the people around them are in the same predicament. In some cases, that's not entirely wrong. But there is always someone around, someone who could be willing to take care of a child for a couple of hours for a parent to get home. There are always options.

However, we all know of the other side. The parent that has no job, but something that keeps them home. Whether it is drugs or alcohol or some other type of debilitation, they are stuck with either very little money, hope, or care. The fact that most addicts refuse or are unable to give up their addiction for their family is a sad reality, but one that can be corrected by a community of help.

In the end, when we are children, it is our parents that we truly look up to. Whether we say that our hero is an athlete, a movie star, a politician, or fictional character, our true hero is our parents. When we're young, we look to them for guidance and support. They're the ones who tell us to listen and trust in authority, to give us strength when people in our classrooms are against us. With them, things like gang violence, school shootings, drug problems, they don't happen in our schools.

It is a team effort, requiring a combination of parents, teachers, school councilors, neighbors, friends, family, police officers and elected officials, all working at different levels. But if everyone puts in effort in the community, then our children and our cities will become better places to live. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. Because everything starts at the home, and it ends with the home as well.

Sources:

http://www.emich.edu/public/geo/Ypsilantiindicators/highschoolcompletion.html

http://www.twincitiesrestaurantblog.com/tcrb/2010/03/manitou-station-white-bear-lake-mn-2.html

Random Review of the Week: A Thousand Suns

Beginning this Monday, I am going to give spotlight to one random selection of media that I have seen, read, listened to, or played over my lifetime.  It could be current, but it could also be something that has come out in the past.  This week, I am going to focus on the latest musical offering from the band Linkin Park, entitled 'A Thousand Suns'.

Cover art for Linkin Park's 'A Thousand Suns'

Ever since the first album by the band, entitled 'Hybrid Theory', their fusion of Rock and Rap musical styling, as well as the lyrics in their songs connected with me.  The CD had lyrics that talked of depression, of sadness, of being alone.  The vocals were dark and moody, the instrumentals went from slow and brooding to fast and angry. It was the beginning of something that would be with me for a long time.  The album would be known by reviewers as 'genre-defining', with them saying that the band has created something entirely new in terms of both Rock and Hip-Hop, spawning a new genre.  This CD would spawn the remix album, entitled 'Reanimation'.  I purchased the CD, but I wasn't a huge fan, since I wanted more original music from them.

Cover Art for the Linkin Park Album 'Hybrid Theory

Two and a half years after Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park released Meteora.  The album continued the music style from their first CD, but each track changed things up, bringing new emotions up, and that album connected with me so much more.  Every track on the album (Minus the foreword, but honestly, who calls that a track?) held a special place on my playlist, one that would fit into the mood of that place.  Each track was just a tremendous placeholder for how I was feeling when it came out, and they still bring up memories when I listen to it.  This CD spawned yet another remix album, this time Partnering with Jay-Z.  I never purchased this album, since having already heard the tracks and how they mashed them together with Jay-Z's work, I was severely uninterested.

Cover Art for the Linkin Park CD 'Meteora'

Then the band took a hiatus, most of the members doing their own thing.  I was anxiously waiting, but as time went on, I believed more and more that their next CD wouldn't come.  Then, in 2006, Linkin Park released the first single from Minutes to Midnight, entitled 'What I've Done'.  The song appeared on the Transformers soundtrack, as well as on their regular album.  After listening to the CD, I did something I hadn't done before with one of their albums.  I picked it apart and only listened to the select tracks that I enjoyed.  The entire album wasn't garbage, but I didn't find the styling of the CD up to par with what they had done before.  Of the twelve tracks on the album, I only truly listened to about half of them.

Cover art for the Linkin Park CD 'Minutes to Midnight'

2010 then became the banner year for Linkin Park, in which they released 'A Thousand Suns'.  Now, initially, my reaction to the album was mixed.  When they released 'The Catalyst' to the public as the first single to the album, I enjoyed the track, but found it incredibly simplistic and devoid of emotion in a lot of cases.  Then they released the entire album as one track on Myspace, and I started listening to that.  I regret even doing that at this point.

The Myspace release turned me off the entire album.  At the point of the release, the CD was unfinished, missing the interludes that included J. Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mario Savio, as well as some of the lyrics.  I wasn't impressed with any of this, and made a personal vow to never listen to the CD, and be more wary of the band in the future.

However, after perusing iTunes one night, I came across the album once again.  The track names were finally given to me, which piqued my curiosity a bit.  Then I started reading the reviews.  It was here in which I came across a review that told me exactly how to enjoy the album.  "Listen to it, without stopping, and pay attention to ALL the lyrics".

At which point, I did, and I don't regret it at all.

I can say that, without a doubt, this is the best album they have ever released.  The reason for this, is that while the album doesn't do something entirely new, the style of music creates a new genre once again.  The album is a concept album, containing a story or apocalypse, of death and destruction.  It is a Post-Apocalyptic rock album, forging a story of nuclear war from a government that we humans let grow out of control out of our own greed and stupidity.

The CD begins with a prelude opening, titled 'The Requiem', which is supposed to set a scene in our minds, of a lone girl in a wasteland, singing to herself in a sad tone as she laments on the current state of the world.  The second track 'The Radiance' further enhances this, as it is J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous quoting of Hindu Scripture as he looks upon the devastation of his latest creation, the atomic bomb.

From here, the CD begins to continuously shift perspectives, going from person to person as they explain how they feel since the cataclysm has fallen.  From a person who feels that the destruction is his fault and needs to repent, to the leader of one rebellion, to someone trying to move on from what has happened, each track sets a stage, tells the story of how humanity has soldiered on since the nuclear holocaust.

The Album then finishes the story with final five tracks on the album.  Each track bringing us to a different emotional experience than previously in the album.  And it is these five tracks that I will break down for you.

The eleventh track of the album is called Wisdom, Justice and Love.  This track, long with the next one Iridescent, are meant to be played as one.  This track gives us a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. that gets more and more distorted as we listen to it, implying that someone else is actually listening to this on a medium that was affected heavily by the blast, finally ending with his last line repeating over and over again:

"Cannot be reconciled with Wisdom, Justice, and Love."

After this, Iridescent begins and the track tells the story of the album itself, that every recording that we have heard previously is nothing more than this same person listening to leaders of the past, trying to figure out what to do.  And now that he has learned, he's ready to put his plan into action.  He asks the people that follow him to stand with him, to fight with him because that the current people in power have done nothing but repeat the same mistakes, and it is time to take action.

This then leads into tracks thirteen and fourteen, 'Fallout' and 'The Catalyst'.  Fallout was an interlude which makes us hear a previous chorus being repeated, which is nothing more than a man's lament about the world around him, recorded and playing on loop until the batteries in the recorder die.  This track seems a bit out of place until you listen to the last two tracks and understand what has happened.  This recording is after the fact, humans have been wiped away, and this came before a final battle for peace, in which humanity ended after many years.

Listening to the CD in order made me realize why I felt that 'The Catalyst' had no emotion, since I listened to it out of order.  What's the point of reading the climax of a novel without first getting to know the characters?  Then comes 'The Catalyst' While listening to it this latest time, I found I was more involved with the music.  The song made me angry, made me want to fight, since this track is when a massive battle is happening.  The resistance against the powers that be has decided to make a stand, and it's for the fate of all of humanity.

This song captures the perfect spirit of rebellion, of what we need to do as a society now.  Our government has grown too large, has gone out of control.  People on both sides of the political aisle have become nothing more than puppets for lobbyists and powerful money-makers who do not have our best interests at heart.  And all we have done as a society is sat back and let them make us into tools for their own gain.

The final track is the conclusion, showing that the rebellion has succeeded and that they're trying to reform everything that has happened.  We as the listener are given the ability to say what has happened afterward, interpreting the 'true' ending to all of the events.

And because of this, it is why I say that this is their best album.  Just like Meteora, this album will have a special place on my playlist, as well as a special place in my heart.  As my life becomes more and more political, more and more divided away from what we do as a society and trying to show what we need to do, this album is a step in the right direction of where we need to be

Review:
5/5 stars.

The United States Blame Game

Hello again.  After a fairly unproductive week, I found something that caught my eye.  I found this comic strip while using the Stumbleupon web application:

Now, upon reading this comic, I do find it funny, for the simple fact that most Americans follow the same pattern of logic.  Even myself, when i'm just not wanting to look at the much larger and complex picture, don't see that there is more to this picture than just the face value.

The complexity of this comic comes from two sides.  The first is the side of the government, with the other being the side of the immigrants.  However, since immigration is such a hot button issue in every election, we'll start with that.

When an immigrant comes to this country legally, gaining citizenship, learning our history, our laws, and any other knowledge of importance in order to function as a normal person in society, I have no problem with it.  If someone wants to have what they deem a better life here, and make it possible legally, I am all for it.  Go on, have fun, live your life, hope everything goes well for you.

However, I do have strong beliefs against people who have gotten here in a way that doesn't go with U.S. law.  I know that a lot of people are seeking asylum in the U.S. for various reasons, but you should be able to go through legal channels in order to gain legal citizenship in the United States.  If you don't have the patience to go through this procedure, then you don't deserve to cross our borders.

At the same time Illegal Immigrants are doing a number on our economy.  An immigrant that is in this country illegally doesn't pay any taxes except for sales tax.  And at the same time, there are members in congressional houses across the country that are trying to pass bills that allow them the same rights as naturalized citizens.  That means social security benefits, welfare, medicaid, programs designed for Legal Americans that have rights by our constitution.

So, while they take our money, they pay nothing into our country.  That's a major burden, considering 11.2 million Illegal Immigrants live in the United States.  So, considering that at the end of the comic, Joe the Plumber American has some reason to blame immigration, as long as he points the finger of blame at the correct legality of the immigrant in question.

However, let's flip the coin on the topic.  Looking at the rest of the comic where the Government, Banks, and Federal Reserve basically act smug in the American's face.  This is where my other problem with the comic starts.

Let's start with the Banks.  Yes, in the recent years, the banking system in the United States has done more harm than good.  I'm not saying that the way we do things is in any way close to perfect, and there does need to be control.  But, on the other hand, our nation is tied into our dollar, and our banks have a portion of control on how money is used in society.

If we let the banks go bankrupt, like they almost did a couple years ago, our economy would not only run the risk of total economic collapse, but be poised to go from one of the largest economic superpowers to one of the most poor nations on this planet.  The value of the dollar would plummet below some of the lowest value currencies, our money would be absolutely worthless.  People wouldn't be able to spend money anywhere with the wages they currently make to support the lost value of our currency.

So, the government bailout of the banks was necessary.  It's not an ideal situation, and I think that there definitely need to be more safeguards and restrictions in place in order to maintain that our economy survives in case of round 2.  However, i do feel that while the banks are an evil entity that controls our livelihood for the most part, they're very necessary and are here to stay.  So, in a way, yes, the government is in the bank's pocket, just like the banks are in the government's pocket.  It's a lose-lose situation as much as it's a win-win situation.  Everyone wins and loses at once, while at the same time being screwed.

Now, the federal reserve, the last part of this comic.  To say that it could lower unemployment, or even eliminate it is true.  However, it's not that Wall Street doesn't want to eliminate unemployment, it's that using the Federal Reserve to do so would slowly decrease the value of the American dollar to about the point it would be if the the banks went down.  It would be a slow death, sure, but a death none the less.  To lower unemployment, they have to have the Treasury print money for the government to start projects that create jobs (A federal or state budget doesn't just come down from the sky you know).  And since the job of the Federal Reserve is to give the american dollar a value that is competitive in the world market, doing too much too fast is counter productive.

At the same time, among all of this in front of you, and given what you've watched your government do over the last 20 years, would you really want our Government to take this much control?  Airports before ran efficiency and smoothly before 9/11.  And then when they re-opened, they had the response time and efficiency of the DMV.  Two hours waits to board your plane, to make sure that no planes went with explosives or anything of that nature.

How about national healthcare?  The United States, for years, has talked about health care in the fact that millions of Americans don't have it, or can't afford it.  So, when President Obama decides to put his own spin on it, look what happens.  The law is deemed unconstitutional since it basically levies a fine on small businesses if they can't afford health care for their workers, and at the same time forces companies to do something that may or may not go against their own obligations.

Even the War in Iraq.  As conservative as I am, the Bush Administration bungled this entirely, using one lone person as an informant, without even looking into what was actually going on.  And now look at what has happened.  This government is spending trillions of dollars on a war we don't want, in a country we don't want to be in, for a government style that hasn't worked correctly for a long time.

On top of all this, our elections have become nothing more than a mud-slinging contest on who can cover up the sun the most.  Each candidate paints themselves as the sunny, grass-is-greener-if-you-vote-for-me style candidate, and every time, we fall for it.  Then we vote them into office, and they either:

a. Do Nothing
or
b. Do what their predecessor did and screw things up more

So this comic, as much as this is the view of most American's, is wrong on many accounts.  It shows an extreme of the American nature, but at the same time, we all need to truly think about what we want as a nation.  On major issues like this, immigration, health care, tax reform, deficit spending, we as Americans need to look at what this government has done, what it wants to do, and what it is actually saying.  Otherwise, we're the ones who are going to end up looking like idiots when we realize that the only one getting ahead is the ones that are doing all the talking.

Introduction

Hello all. I am Kelly Francis and as a long-time friend of Steve's was commissioned to join the blog. I have never blogged. I'm not entirely sure I even know what a blog is. But here I am to learn and grow. You will find me a quite striking opposite to Steve. I deal primarily in fiction and poetry but the messages and themes herein will quite often be similar. I love analyzing the human condition and expressing criticism of my kind. I do not distinguish between colors, flags, lines, rarely even gender. Man is man. A whole and single entity.

I do not apologize for what I write. I do not beg forgiveness for what I write. I write what I am and I am what I write. So, with that, let's get started...

Rambling Away

Hello everyone,
As my introduction above says, my name is Steven Wauford.  I'm a Web Design Student at Wayne County Community College.  I decided to start this blog after seeing through my studies how much effect that the recent wave of technological advancement has changed how we as a society view the world at large as well as the world right outside our window.  And I think that the time has come for me to chip in my two cents.  


You're going to be seeing posts on a wide variety of topics, from movie/music/game reviews, to ideas on political culture around the world, to just inane ramblings about life in general.  Some may have relevance to the day some may night.  But the important thing to me is that these ideas get out on paper.  I'm not trying to be as conceited as saying that I am one of the most creative or innovative thinkers, but clearing my head would really help me becoming a much more confident person.  So, I hope that you enjoy this blog.


I am happy that this could be my first post here, because I saw something in the last few days that kind of astonished me.  Now, I haven't grown up in Detroit, Michigan.  The fact is that I've spent the last four, almost five years in the suburbs, looking at the Motor City like it is nothing more then a very large blemish on the state of Michigan.  Heck, the closest i've even gotten to spending a decent amount of time downtown is being on the Wayne State Campus.


The reason for this is because through these last years, I've watched this city, which was once one of the most powerful industrial cities in the United States, fall into a collapsed, ruined shell of it's former self.  Whether it was through corrupt mismanagement of an Immoral Mayor, using our cities funds and benefits for his own personal gain, or through major corporations finding that jobs in the United States (Michigan especially) aren't worth sustainability compared to jobs in other countries, I have seen this city fall into its own little circle of hell with no way to begin to rise up once more.


But, the funny thing is, it's amazing how easy a small thing can pull an idea into a person's mind, or maybe even change a perspective of even the most skeptical person.  And on Super Bowl Sunday, that small little thing actually changed a perception in me.  Not enough to say that the city is a lot better than in recent history, but at least improvement might be on the horizon.

Now, I don't agree that this one TV Spot during the biggest football game of the year should've gotten the amount of press that it did.  But, the message it brought across, to the large audience that it got to, is something that should be noted.

For years now, when talking about this city, every paper in the country talked about the fledging auto companies, the violence, the corrupt mayor and the mansion scandal.  Nothing was said about the humanity found in certain individuals.  The strength found in a large majority of this city to strive to be better.  Nothing was said about that, because honestly, that's not what sells.  That's the sad truth.


But that TV spot showed the world something else.  Yes, it was only an ad for a car, but in that ad they showcased the city, both the light and the dark, and how people are trying to rise up out of their own struggles to bring themselves and this city into a better and brighter era.  But it is not something that one or two people can do on their own.


This is something that we all have to come together about, because only together can we make this city a better place.  Yes, there are a lot of people that feel down and out, that feel like there is no escape to their every day lives.  But this is never the full truth.  People are where they are because they choose to be in the ruts that they reside in, and whether they have the strength and courage to get out of those ruts is entirely up to them.  And once one person starts moving, other people should be empowered by their example and allow themselves to bring themselves out of their own holes.


But like I said, this is going to have to be a massive effort by numerous people.  The citizens of Detroit and its major metropolitan area have to band together in order to fix his beloved city.  And I say beloved because in some ways, it holds a special place in the heart of every single person who lives here, no matter how deeply buried that place is.


First thing that needs to be done, is that people have to start paying attention to what is being pulled away.  Look at our school system.  Just like most schools in the country, the less a school performs academically, the less money they receive to pay for salaries, food, books, and the general education of our cities children.  And on top of that, the parents are working two, even three jobs in order to support themselves and their children, which takes time away from actually parenting being done.

That is unacceptable.  But it's not the fault of just one, it's the fault of all.  As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and that is as true today as it was two-hundred years ago.  There are always resources at our disposal in order to raise children correctly.  Whether it be parents, grandparents, neighbors, people have the resources in order to bring up children with a moral code that speaks loud and clear to the future as a code of ethics that we can actually get behind instead of fear.


Plus, the schools that receive the most funding are the ones that are already doing up to the standards that have been set.  So since they have proven that they can make due with the funds that they already have, why give them more than necessary in order to keep going?  A school that has laid off faculty shouldn't have to go deeper into debt because they can't afford to pay for books, teachers, programs, and everything else.  The fact is, that these cuts only hinder the education of the students of this city.  Without more funding to places who actually need it, we will be unable to pull the city school system out of the black hole that it has entered.


On top of that, look who people have elected into office in the recent years.  The fact that Kwame Kilpatrick got voted into office for another term amidst all the scandals and corruption is beyond comprehension.  Heck, the fact that, even though I am a conservative, Bush managed to stay in office without contention is beyond me.

But the story is different with Kwame.  During his time in office, has been connected through the news to a rap sheet long enough to stretch from one side of the detroit river to the other.  With acts like murder, conspiracy to commit murder, misuse of public funds, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy to commit perjury, it's surprising he lasted his first term in office, much less his second.  And the fact that he was voted in a second time, considering that he's fought so hard to make sure people are on his side when he is clearly a snake in the grass, is beyond any form of belief.


So, in this next election, we need to look at who we're voting into office.  Our elected officials are supposed to represent our needs, look at the needs of the community, and then choose what is feasibly done based on the resources that their jurisdiction holds, and then gain new resources in order to make their jurisdiction a better area to be in.  However, if the person we put into office is unable to do their job, or unwilling to do it, then we need to make sure that we do not vote them in.  When in doubt, look at their history in order to see how they will be in their terms in office.


These things are only a small cog in a much larger machine.  This machine requires all citizens of detroit, its outlying areas and its leaders to band together and actually work at fixing what we have let fall into ruin.  Yes, there are many more problems than what I have just described, but nothing is too challenging for this city.  Because no one really knows what the people in this city are truly capable of except for us, and now it is our time to show the world that we can bounce back from the hell that we've let ourselves fall into.


Because, like the script Eminem reads at the end of that TV Spot, "This is the Motor City.  And this is what we do."




Photos from:
darkpassage.com
mlive.com
spreadartculture.com


Videos from:
Youtube.com - Chrysler Corporation