Today-ish In The War On Youth

While this reporter hopes not to drown his sensitive & easily offended/driven-to-a-burning-rage psyche in the constant stream of sewage that washes from the chattering classes, some like to wade right in & in our own way we're appreciative, not that we retract whatever crap we've typed about TPM's proprietor.

In the constant stream of articles that wash over us from an ever-expanding number of publications, a few stand out. One of them is an article published this morning by The Wall Street Journal. The subject was the increasing tendency for schools to bring in the police for incidents that most of us over 30 or certainly 40 would think of as things schools handle with detention or suspension or one of the other tools we associate with school discipline.

Here's where I remember why I'm not a big fan of Marshall.

The first is that anyone who is critical of hyper-policing and its partner over-incarceration needs to understand that the crime wave of the mid-late 20th century was real. See the charts here. The irony is that the most draconian policies were put in place just as the wave was subsiding. I think the reaction was misguided. But we can't understand the social or historical questions without recognizing that crime - particularly violent crime - seem to be rising inexorably. And a public reaction to that, of some sort, was almost inevitable. The question now is how we unwind it.

Yeah, wring your hands a little more, that'll help. Call it irony. And vote. We see over & over & over & over & over again how much voting helps.

The other point may be a more tenuous connection. But I am not sure these trends can be separated from the other trends in American society over the last few decades. We know the old saw that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And we see this pattern in the increasing size and prominence of the Pentagon over the Department of State - in part since the Second World War but especially since the end of the Cold War.

Whatever one thinks of US national security policy, wars and all the rest, I increasingly think it is a fascinating thought problem to say, 'How would we or could we react to [Crisis X] if we simply didn't have a military that could strike with great lethality basically anywhere on the globe.' Again, whatever your views of national security policy it's a fascinating and often illuminating thought problem. Syria? ISIS? Ukraine? Those islands in the South China Sea. Of course, to paraphrase Ella Fitzgerald, in many ways, it's just better to be a strong country than a weak one. But an over-reliance on force brings its own problems.

And I could not help connecting this reality to what I was reading this morning about the criminalization of what many of us probably think of as the usual errors and learning experiences of growing up.

Also, when calling this nation of sheep a fascist shit-hole, call it a fascist shit-hole. (Chant w/ me now ... "Fasc-ist shit-hole!" "Fasc-ist shit-hole!" That's right.) That pseudo-lefty dog-whistling is inaudible to real Americans too nervous about Ebola & ISIS to think, straight or otherwise.