F*** Joplin

I don’t want to be insensitive but seriously, fuck Joplin, Missouri.  I’m not saying that they haven’t been through a struggle and haven’t persevered during a catastrophe but a year later, we have the president giving a commencement speech and stories all over the news about how people decided not to roll over and die after they were hit by the tornado.  What, exactly, were they supposed to do, group suicide?

How much money came flowing into that little town after the tornado was gone?  How much support did they get from the federal government that so many of them have come to vilify?   That’s not even counting all the support that they got from private citizens.

I’m not mad at them for taking a helping hand after a tragedy.  I’m mad because it has been blown way out of proportion.  We’ve been talking about Joplin for a year now and that was a completely unforeseeable disaster, meanwhile, here in KC, the completely avoidable disasters have kept on rolling with very little media attention. 

The Kansas City Public School system finally reached a new low and lost its accreditation.  The surrounding school districts responded not with their usual indifference but with actual contempt for the students that were so evidently being done a disservice.  They did, and are doing, anything they can to block and stall students from filling their better performing classrooms.  While the local media manages to come up with a story about it maybe once a week, most of the attention goes to how poor the school district is and offer no ideas for improvement.  The real losers are the kids of course.

Those that do manage to graduate are ill-prepared for college or anything above menial labor.  Those that don’t manage to graduate often have children to care for with no marketable skills (or basic skills for that matter) to ensure their children won’t have to face the education system and poverty at the same time.

What frustrates me is that Kansas City has been on this path for the last 30 years.  I can’t blame the mayor or the school board because they are just carrying this torch the only way they’ve been told to.  They try the same failing solutions over and over and shrug their shoulders when it doesn’t work, just like last time. 

I have to blame my fellow citizens for this one.  The black people are so damned apathetic because they grew up in the same environment and have learned to accept their fates.  The white people don’t care because they can get decent jobs with little competence and move their asses to the suburbs.  In the meantime, the inner city continues to sink into itself.  Our local leaders are afraid to admit that it is the black communities’ ultimate responsibility.  They’d rather blame racism than actually seek to control the education of their children.  The one incidence of black people control the education has been the Afrikan Centered Education campus.  While it continually outperforms the rest of the district, the district actually thinks it would be a good idea for them to take over the program.  I’m sure they have the kids in mind on that one.

Another reason that I don’t give a shit about Joplin is that we have a much bigger random death problem here in Kansas City.  While I don’t think that we have had as many murders as there were deaths in Joplin because of the tornado, I bet it is pretty close.  Not to mention, the catastrophe in Kansas City will continue to drag on as long as we don’t confront it.  Part of that has to be media attention, which we just aren’t going to get while we are weeping for poor old Joplin. 

I feel bad for those people that the sky fell on that night.  I really do.  However, that is why I wouldn’t want to live in a hick town in Middle America.  Tornados are only part of the reason.  They tend not to be so friendly to uppity coloreds like yours truly. 

Honestly, that might be at the heart of my feelings for Joplin.  Those people don’t give a flying fuck about the steady decline for us in the inner city and being constantly bombarded with how terrible it was in Joplin for like 3 months is an insult to those of us in the hood that are astute enough to see our children’s futures fly off into the night sky, as if the town was being hit by a constant, dream killing tornado.  Too bad there isn’t a warning system for that.  At least the news anchors would actually have a good reason to interrupt the playoffs.