Kirkwood has an opportunity to prove it is a special community
Kirkwood is really just a microcosm of the rest of our St. Louis community and the rest of our country. The well to do whites and the poor blacks are still separated by money and real estate. The well to do whites might not like the way that the poor black community lives and the conditions that they survive in but all we want to do is stay away from them and hope someone in government will come along and clean up the mess. The government’s solution is to replace the squalor with fancy schmancy new real estate and to heck with where the black community goes as long as it is somewhere else! The anger and frustrations that lead to the shootings last week in Kirkwood as well as the one a few years ago have not been erased by these events. If the community does not do something to help erase the tense feelings between the black community in Meacham Park and the rest of Kirkwood, something other than shoving the poor black residents of Meacham Park out, we are likely to see more tragic events in the future like these shootings in the past. The US government certainly did not just stand by after 9/11, they made changes and not just by adding metal detectors. Kirkwood has an opportunity to show themselves and the rest of the world that they are really the special community they say that they are here. They could easily create a model for all communities in the country to try and revitalize the poor black areas and bring those people back closer to the mainstream of our society. Think it will ever happen?? Timothy Finley
Former resident of Kirkwood
The writer seems to think that all whites are well-to-do and all blacks are poor. Sorry to burst your bubble but there are many poor whites and many well-to-do blacks.
The community and the government cannot fix this problem. They’ve been trying for almost 50 years. Ask any well-to-do person of any color or skin shade how they got to be well-to-do and they’ll tell you education and hard work. They didn’t sit around blaming someone else for there problems. They worked their tail off to get where they are.
If you want your kids to do better than you, get involved with their schooling, work with them at home, make then borrow the army slogan to be all they can be. That’s how they’ll move into the well-to-do arena.
You said “The US government certainly did not just stand by after 9/11, they made changes and not just by adding metal detectors.” Your right but our borders are still wide open, We have sham security at our airports where TSA can’t find the pratice bombs the GAO uses but they can tell if you have 1/2 an ounce too much shampoo.
The last thing we need is more government interference. Of course their too busy anyway taking care of the really pressing problem of steroids in MLB.