about the felony
to be honest, I'm not sure why packing a big marker can be a felony. but stranger things have happened here... for instance, CA bans Shuriken (ninja stars), Nunchuks (which they make fun of in "Wedding Crashers".. a CA joke), and Butterfly knives (probably because of movies like "West Side Story" and Jackie Chan movies where all the "Azn boys" are expert knife-flipping kung-fu masters).
I always thought that the 3 aforementioned were usually more dangerous to the untrained wielder than any supposed victim, but i dunno, wiser heads than mine in sacramento....
for those of you who read the knife threads, CA also bans collapsible batons (it's a FELONY, and this one Jim March has confirmed) but encourages carry of knives of pretty much any length....
as for the marker, I've been told that markers with tips that exceed 1" are considered felony items - the penal code listed earlier seems to be for ones over 3/8 inch. then again, it could be that the "felony" my kid's charged with was a fake intended to scare the kid into spilling whatever he might know about Flores gang... or make up.
he told me that on several occasions his brother (who probably is a gangster and maybe even a drug dealer, but supports Mario and has asked me and other teachers to help him keep Mario out of the same trouble) was arrested, given a court date, and then offered a chance to "talk".
when he showed up in court, nobody knew who he was - apparently the "filed charges" were bogus.
The rotten truth is, city life is saturated with rot - and the layers of corruption, resident and government alike, are so thoroughly permeated by chronic ignorance and selfishness (devil take the last man in kind of thinking) that anyone who wants to do good (cops, folks, kids) must constantly struggle against despair in the face of such overwhelming want.
People resort to crime because they are poor, they are poor because they can't find a job, they can't find a job because they aren't educated, they aren't educated because of a desperate lack of people willing to take the high road, people willing to take the high road avoid L.A. because of the corrupt system, the system is corrupt because ignorant & selfish people are attracted to the exploitable poor (and corresponding exploitable federal/state funds) like flies to dog poop.
Last school year (which for us, a 3-track school, ended a month ago) our Title 1 federal funds office could not account for nearly $400,000 out of a budget of $900,000... the intervention classes which I teach, and for which the money had been earmarked for (among other such classes), could not even make xerox copies because all the money to buy paper had mysteriously vanished.
the really sad part is, it probably wasn't even embezzled... probably just wasted on catering and other silly crap like that. bear in mind that her in L.A. most administrators have had only five years, often less, of actual teaching experience - and usually those in areas other than L.A.
don't get me wrong - there are MANY people (cops, kids, parents, even the occasional bean-counter) here trying to do the good thing, but I guess I've just been posting this so that those of you who only get the Newsweek or A Current Affair (a show which my kids are scared to watch, because the camera vans are often filming on THEIR block) version of "hispanic / black inner city life" which frequently seems to paint those folks as degenerate, stupid, drug-crazed low-lifes giving teenage birth to retarded neglected babies have some idea what it's really like - these are people who are only a few thousand dollars short of where you are morally.
but those few thousand dollars come with a crushing social system that has produced disastrous exponential long term effects on an entire demographic.
sure, shoot the drug dealers, lock up the thugs, but don't let your "victories" there blind you to the reasons why these people have come to exist in such large numbers here in the first place.
California - and LA's stupid, bull-headed single-prong attack on urban crime will never be truly effective as it merely stamps out (with collateral damage) crime while ignoring (probably because it's much harder to deal with) the conditions that produce such and indeed, often even contributes to those same conditions.
My feelings on "criminals" of late has become like that of a video clip I saw of marines firing on Iraqis charging a base gate only to save the lives of those they had shot up minutes after combat - when they are trying to kill me, I will gun them down without hesitation, but whenever possible, I will give them what aid I can.
and that, I hope, is the high road.
