Baltimore 4/27/15 Poem by Joseph Narusiewicz

Baltimore, to me represents the system itself boiling over with rage. This rioting is more than young teenagers having a moment under the camera to play, it is a systemic problem of wealth distribution with people frustrated and in despair. The police oppression of blacks and minorities may have triggered it but the causes go deeper then that.
This isn’t happening at some gated community; it resembles the riots of 1968 etc. This is despair, resentment of feeling trapped. The feeling of no future producing violence. You can’t just ship jobs out and offer people jobs they can never get ahead on in drug infested and gang ridden communities with broken families. To me it is the failure of the American system itself, our educational system, our willingness to incarcerate rather then spend the money on the front end and try to place every child and citizen into a decent career and job situation. Our system has helped create this deplorable situation.
Start spending a lot more money on educating poor and average Americans rather then spending enormous amounts of money on jail and prisons. Raise the minimum wage. Free trade schools and college. Tax the rich like the 1950’s. Get down to the real reasons why these riots are happening and show the true victims of a deplorable system that simply is not working and is full of racism, classism and despair.
Conservatives and right wing evangelicals will concentrate on the crime aspect of Baltimore, so they can rationalize the social-economic disparity in the system itself. They don’t want to see the repression, racism, injustice and greed creating these kind of situations. Selfishness blinds the eyes of modern conservatism and as long as they have money and healthcare etc they use superficial reasonings to dismiss all the poor, imprisoned, unemployed, disenfranchised and hurting people as lazy, criminal etc. Don’t fool yourself people. The gap between the haves and have nots is growing and the conservative movement is one of the main reasons why. If you’re a republican or a tea party person, REPENT! What happened to Freddie Gray is pure evil and only apart of the real story of todays AMERICA!