Enough is Enough: A Call for Peace & Justice

The travesty of the riots in Baltimore is a great example of how not to protest. The most successful protests in history involved nonviolence, as well as great perseverance, from Martin Luther King's bus boycott or march on Selma, to Ghandi's hunger strikes, all were nonviolent. The media attention on catastrophe and sensationalism is atrocious, and extremely shameful. They focus on the cities when they're burning, but forget once its done. The homeless, and impoverished all deal with the inequality everyday, while the media acts as though the only thing that occurs within the city is riots from police violence. Enough is seriously enough. To ignore the real problems in these neighborhoods is to deny the fact that these protests and riots have salient meaning outside of another black person dead.
These neighborhoods are susceptible to this violence because of terrible conditions people face everyday. This is what needs to be stopped. The peaceful protests are trying to raise this awareness, to let people know that there is a real reason behind all that is going on in cities like Cleveland, Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. There is habitual police brutality bordering on what one would imagine seeing in oppresive communism regimes. Beyond the police violence, gang violence strikes deep into the core of inner city life. There are more inner city kids per capita who have PTSD than soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a huge problem, these kids suffering from PTSD tend to lack proper learning skills, and cannot focus in school. This causes students to leave school, as the graduation rates are on average below 50%. This epidemic is by far the leading cause of increased gang violence. In response the police work more by abusing the offenders, while ignoring the possible victims of this terrible epidemic.
What needs to be done is determined by the community, as each affected area has its own individual problem that needs to be handled by the people who live there. There also needs to be that awareness raised about the troubles of the inner city. All of this, along with cooperation by the local police departments maybe a change can happen. Unfortunately, I fear that our nation will soon forget the tragedy, and move on to the next sensationalized news story, while cities rot from the core.