Can a rapper help to stop terrorism here at home?

"And the struggle of the brothas and the folks
With lovers under dope, experiments to discover hopes
Scuffle for notes, the rougher I wrote, times was harder
Went from rock star to the voice of a martyr

Why white folk focus on dogs and yoga
While people on the low end try to ball and get over.."  ~~Common~

 

Common, I have mad love for you, but maybe it's time for some of our peeps to  focus on "dogs and yoga" instead of just trying "to ball and get over".

 

Still, I love what you are doing in your hometown with this wave of violence that has gripped it. A peace summit might not be the answer, but it's a start.

 

There is some deep stuff going in Chicago. Young bucks are literally at war with each other. Beefs can escalate like that. We have had them here in Philly.

 

Sometime ago two different blocks in the same neighborhood in Southwest Philly were at war over a diss and a punch on a basketball court. And over the next few years countless young men lost their lives as a result. I know the back story, because a couple of these young men were my clients at one time or another.

 

The problem of youth violence in urban America is a complex and difficult, and there is a lot of blame to go around: Dead beat fathers dropping their sperm and leaving to let the streets raise their sons. Mothers who coddle their sons and allow "Baby Boy" to do whatever and whenever, because they hope that he can take the place of the father they never had. A broken political system that cares more about building prisons than investing in programs to keep kids off the streets and better educate them. A morbid and unhealthy fascination with guns and their status in our culture, which leads to an easy access to those guns.

 

All these things have come together in Chicago to form a perfect storm of violence and death. Thirteen people shot Thursday night and four people lost their lives last night.    

 

O, you might want to forget about Syria and focus on your back yard for awhile. I know that terrorism is real (see what happened in that mall in Kenya), but we have some little terrorist here at home who we might need to watch as well. Those Islamic terrorist in Africa shot up a mall for political reasons, these young bucks will shoot up a mall here in Amurderca because of a diss.

 

So good luck Common, I hope that the summit will do some good. Sadly, though, I don't think it will. We have tried this kind of thing before, and it seems that we are right back to square one.

 

"I feel like we just gotta sit 'em down and build with them. Talk to them, get some type of peace thing going," he said. "It's bigger than rap. Kids is dying. I would tell Keef and all of them cats, 'Man we gotta sit down and figure out how we're gonna get to a peace meeting.'"

 

Honestly, we have to figure out how to do a whole lot more than that.