It's clear that Albany has a violence problem like so many of our inner-cities have. It's also clear that this violence is bred out of racism and hatred of a certain class of Americans, along with a systematic discrimination against those too poor and with too dark of a skin color to successfully participate in our economic system.

Young African Americans are picking up guns and other tools of violence and hurting one and other. They see no other choice, and they are bred in a culture of violence and despair that shows no other options to them then hurting other Americans.

To quote the late R.D. Laing:

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.

If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.

If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.

There is so much violence on our televisions and across the world. You can not escape the body counts in Iraq as they are on the television, in the news, and in the papers. Combined with marginalization of a whole class of people, we end of producing destructive people who will act in ways that harm others.

We need to rehabilitate our cities and change how the poor lives. We must re-educate the poor and take them out of the poverty they live in. We must overcome our racism and try to change our society to make the city the core of our lives. We have to overcome our past.

Only when this happens will Albany become a less violent city.