Monday, May 17, 2010

The future is bleak

"One of my son's classmates told the children to bring pistols to school because they were going to form a drug gang and play at kidnapping children," said the mother of an 8-year-old boy in Ciudad Juarez.

This quote from a Reuters story about how some kids in Mexico are idolizing narcos and criminals (Link in title of post). This is the best story I've read on this problem. From my own reporting as well as other things I've read, I think it's still just a tiny minority of children who aspire to this sort of future, and is by no means cause for widespread panic. But with trust in politicians and businessmen so low, and with so few opportunities for ordinary people to work their way up within the system, convincing kids that crime doesn't pay is going to be increasingly difficult. It doesn't help that so many of their teachers are a bunch of racketeers either.

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