Wisonsin State Fair?

This is an open letter to Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal regarding his Sunday, August 7th opinion column: http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/127077078.html

Mr. Stingl,

The recent events at Mayfair, Riverwest and State Fair can be construed as a cry for help or a call to arms, but it should not be dismissed as "wilding" youths who should be put down with extreme prejudice.

Ignore the root cause of these escalating public eruptions at your own risk.

I have heard so many funny, contradictory and simply wrong-headed things in the aftermath of this incident. To those people who pronounced they would not be attending the State Fair - now is the safest time to go. To Police Chief Flynn who "beefed" up police presence at African World Festival, thank you but it was not necessary - for the second year in a row, African World Festival was the chillest location in Milwaukee - although all the officers I encountered seemed to be having a good time.

Take Knuckle-headed Alds. Bob Donovon and Joe Dudzik (please!) - Tweedledum and Tweedledummer - who had the unmitigated gall to opine in a joint statement "Let's face it, it also has much to do with a deteriorating African-American culture in our city. Are large groups of Hispanics or Hmong going out in large mobs and viciously attacking whites? No."

To which I respond, give Hispanics and Hmongs fifty years of the treatment African-Americans have suffered in this city and they will be "wilding," too. (Funny thing: whites don't tend to flee when Hispanics and Hmongs move into their neighborhoods. Could it be the hair?)

I challenge any race to endure generations of poverty and lack of job opportunity - and by that I mean constant rejection for any the most menial of positions and not be just a little bit perturbed. During the Reagan Depression, I was unemployed for two-and-a-half years and - despite being a high school honors student with five years of work experience - I could not find a job at a car wash. So, imagine, if you will, what is a high school drop-out with no work experience is up against.

What are we, as a people, to make of studies done all over the country where blind tests prove employers are more likely to hire a white ex-con than a black college graduate http://millionsforreparations.org/wessel.html? Where does that put your prospects if you are a black high school drop-out or a black ex-con? How do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don't have any boots?

I constantly tell my children - both on academic scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and both graduates of Milwaukee Public High Schools - that the only difference between poor, uneducated black people and poor, uneducated white people, is that poor, uneducated white people have jobs (the same apparently applies to Hispanics and Hmongs).

We are currently being governed by the evil spawn of those who fled, politicians inbred in Waukesha and Washington Counties. These elected officials, who have only second-hand - and tainted - knowledge of Wisconsin's inner cities, believe in a "get tough" stance that not only hasn't solved the problem, it hasn't contained it. And, mark my words, it will spread further.

If those marauding youths did nothing else on a steamy Thursday night in West Allis, Wisconsin, they made you look. Unfortunately, they could not make you see.

~(no)rave!