IBO, Brian R. Lundin [the ebook reader .txt] 📗

cruel and callous enemy. We are at war with our own citizens, our own children, the gangbangers and dope dealers who have turned our streets into a war zone, where decent hardworking American are afraid to go to their parks or to the grocery store after dark. Our children and we are the victims of these criminals. Recently, there have been some highly publicized and lauded reports showing declines in various types of violent crimes. Reported incidents of rapes, burglaries and robberies are down and that is certainly welcome but I am not convinced that this represents an ongoing tend. It won’t take much-a drop in the economy, a new generation of drug addicted babies growing up without any realistic expectations of achieving the American dream by hard work, to make our society as violent as ever. I wonder when this reducing in crime begin to spiral upwards will these same politicians and law enforcement experts who are now taking bows will be around to accept the blame for what some of us already see coming, an upsurge in drug and gang related violent crimes. Many of us think of terrorist as some wide-eye lunatic with bombs strapped to his body. Ready to kill himself and innocent people while quoting passages from the Koran or other religious scripts, but terrorism is not an expression of rage but a way to undermine a government or a society. A way to make the people lose faith and respect in their government’s ability or will to protect them.
Our terrorist, are our own children who have no respect for anyone or anything. They have no respect whatsoever for the law, parents, teacher or police. Life to them is nothing; my life, your life or an innocent child life playing in the street or sitting in his home watching television. Life means nothing to these low-life. The only thing that matters to them is making money. They take advantage of the weaknesses of some of our less fortunate citizens who are unable to resist the temptation of finding an easy way out by getting high off drugs. They exploit the needs of these people by offering them a painless escape from their improvised lives. The large profits they are making from the sell of this death drug have corrupted our criminal justice system. Police officers has been snared in this culture of corruption by providing protection to these gang members for a fee, by running drug rings themselves and committing robberies and burglaries of the drug dealers they are suppose to be arresting. Judges and politicians are not exempt from this pattern of corruption. There are far too many incidents of judges being swept up in this corruption by dismissing criminal cases for a fee or giving short sentences. Politicians have accepted political contributions from sources they know are not legitimate.”
Senator Warren, Jr. paused a moment for effect and wiped off his glasses before continuing, his deep baritone voice rising.
“Bear with me as I relate to you a letter I received from one of my constituents, a single mother trying to raise three teenage sons.”
The senator slowly removed a letter from the inside of his coat pocket, placed it on the podium and began to read.
“Dear Sir, I have been a resident of Little Rock, Arkansas all of my life and I am fifty-fives years old. My husband was killed ten years ago in a drive-by shooting and I have had to be the mother and father to my three sons. I tried to raise them the best I could. I made sure they went to school, to church with me on Sunday and be in the house at a decent hour. They were good boys until they became gang members, then they changed, especially my youngest.
He started selling crack cocaine for his gang when he was ten and became addicted to it when he was eleven. I caught him one time in the basement of our home snorting the drugs from a Pepsi-Cola can. He was using the drugs he was suppose to be selling and he often receiving severe beatings by the gang for using up the entire stock. The gang kicked him out when he was twelve and dropped out of school the next year. He became a male prostitute and committed other crimes to support his drug addiction. He began to lose weight, had ulcerations inside both nasal passages, and was slowly going blind due to the poison they use to cut the drugs. He suffered from loss of memory and numerous other physical problems. One of his former gang members shot him to death when in an attempted robbery. He was only sixteen years old. The police also told me that he was a suspect in over twenty other armed robberies. He was the major suspect in six killings and nine shootings of drug dealers. My two other sons eighteen and nineteen years old are currently in prison for an assortment of crimes that were gang or drug related. Every day I wonder what did I do wrong in the raising of my sons and I pray for the parents of other young people who are caught up in this hell called gangs and drugs.
I saw on television a report by your committee on gangs and drugs please continue your good work and expose these criminals for what they are, scum. They are like worms, low and dirty that hides from the light. I hope the government will crush them wherever they are found and use any means available legal or illegal to fumigate the scum who crawl under the rocks. Continue your fight and hopefully another family will not have to watch a loved one go down the hellish path my sons did, God bless you.”
The senator slowly folded the letter and placed it in his suit coat pocket. When he continued, there was a slight tremble in his usually strong voice.
“This is just an example of how our enemies has effected out society. My committee has conducted countless interviews with mothers whose sons and daughter lives have been cut short by, like the writer of the letter said, scum. I have reports concerning young men and women who has been gunned down in the streets and at their funerals these heartless thugs, members of a rival gang have came into the funeral home and dumped the dead body out of the casket onto the floor and shot the already dead body in front of their grieving family. This enemy has no respect for life or the American way; this enemy has invaded our schools, our government and even the most sacred of all sanctuaries, our homes.
This enemy has turned our homes into barred prisons; we have bars on our windows and doors, hoping to keep them out and worst of all they have infected our most precious resource, our children with their deadly drugs and violence. This enemy has turned some of our children into lost souls, zombies, like the walking dead, and this enemy has made us afraid to leave our homes after dark.
The enemy that threatens us all has more firepower than our local police officers and they have a seemingly unlimited supply of automatic weapons and handguns. The FBI has intelligence that they are trying to purchase stinger missiles and other hand-held missile weapons.
These terrorists have better and more sophisticated weapons than our local law enforcement agencies, but unlike our police officers, they do not care about harming innocent people. They will fire hundreds of rounds into a crowd of people in order to kill one or two people. This enemy has taken over our street and communities; he thinks he owns the streets, the neighborhood, and the playgrounds. On September 11, 2001, our country suffered the worst terrorist attack, on our soil in our history, but the terrorist that threaten us now is not some religious fanatic or some rogue government that hate us, the terrorist is homegrown, the terrorist are our own children. Our children are the drug dealers and gang members. Our children are selling the poisons to other children that they inject into their veins and snort up their noses. Our children are causing the unprovoked violence in our communities.
My committee has found that eighty five percent of the violence in our communities is drug and/or gang related and that ninety percent of the most violent gangs in this country are black or Hispanic, with member ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-five years of age. My committee also found that while blacks and Hispanics only make up about twenty-seven percent of our society they represent ninety-two percent of our prison population. Additionally, not only are the blacks and Hispanics the major drug dealers and gang bangers they also are committing most of the other crimes, the rapes, robberies, murders, etc, etc, etc. I don’t watch the news anymore, I am sick of seeing the violence. Now, I watch reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Warren waited until the laughter died down before continuing.
“We have tried everything to stem this wave of violence that is a by-product of the drug market. We have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on increased law enforcement efforts. We increased the budget for the coast guard and the custom services. We have drug sniffing dogs, employed our leading scientist who have developed a spectrometer-type robot that can “sniff” out drugs in luggage. We have surveillance helicopters that patrol our coastal waters. We have sent our best military operatives, the crack United States Army’s Green Berets, to foreign countries to help train and equip their law enforcement agencies in their drug war. We have developed sophisticated remote control microphones, cameras and communication equipment to monitor the drug traffic, we have instituted drug and gang awareness programs in our schools, we have built more prisons, stiffen the sanctions for drug related crimes, appointed drug czars, instituted media advertisement showing the dangers of drugs and gangs, but nothing has worked.
Some of your civil libertarians will say that crime is up in black and Hispanic communities because of heavier police patrols. They try to give some sociological reasons for the increase in crimes in these communities such as no jobs, discrimination, etc, etc, etc. Some of the debaters say that we need to get tougher on crime, with more prisons and stiffer sentences while other debaters will say that idea is nothing but political posturing-that we as a society need to spend more money on social programs, and get to “the root of the problem” by attacking the causes of poverty and social injustice. Some say the answer lies in education or better job opportunities.
Psychiatrist suggest that early intervention with potentially problem children-to get them out of dysfunctional homes where they are exposed to drug addiction and criminal families is the key. They suggest that these youngsters undergo therapy and exposure to positive role models. None of these suggestions is, or should be, mutually exclusive. Of course, we have to identify potential problem children and intervene before it is too late. Of course we have to offer better education and job opportunities for minority youngsters, but what we need now, is an all out war on drugs dealers and gang bangers, to throw everything we’ve got at the enemy. Many of these young blacks and Hispanic males are criminals who have no interest in abiding by the laws of the land.
This war on drugs and gang terrorism is the most epic struggle of our time and will be for the foreseeable future, and like it