Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The most interesting thing I've read in weeks

Fascinating Account of gangs in LA. Wait till you get to the funeral on page 6. My jaw just kept dropping further and further. Well-written and thorough.

4 comments:

Jeff said...

Absolutely amazing. How can I go day to day without knowing how bad this is, how far things have gone?

Shells said...

That is really, really scary.

Disco Mom said...

That was a very, very, very long article for my short attention span, but I stuck it out. Amazing. Terrifying. Pathetic. Hopeless. Shocking. I'm going to bed.

Maren said...

It is really scary, but I have to admit that it's only as bad as I suspected it already was. My mother-in-law teaches ELS at a middle school in Cache County, UT and she has some truly horrible stories to tell about the hispanic gangs her students belong to. The parents are mostly illegals who work 12-hour shifts at a meat processing plant and have little control over what their kids do, so many of the boys are hustled into the local gangs before the parents have any idea what hit them. She's gone to gang-related funerals, etc.

It's incredibly sad that there's no real love, no real family, no real sense of personal identity inside of those gangs in LA- the violence seems to permeate every minute of every day for every resident of those projects. And the idea that they can spread so easily to places that are totally unprepared to deal with them... that is scary. "Gadianton Robbers", man. That's what gangs remind me of.