Congratulations go out to Rev. Glenn Grayson on the completion of the Jeron X. Community Center in the Hill District. Also congratulations to Cheryl Hall-Russell on her work to get a Charter School opened in the Hill House geared toward high school dropouts.
Hopefully these two accomplishments will take more kids off the streets, and into the classrooms thus into careers. The past few weeks have been deadly for Black males on the streets, so hopefully as more Charter Schools, Community Centers and After School Programs are created, more young men and women will realize that choosing the streets is suicide.
Also hats off to Judge Dwayne and wife Joy Woodruff in their efforts with “Do the Write Thing” campaign which is already working to keep young Black males off the streets and in the classrooms.
Herman Reid, the former head of NEED, has created BOLD, a program to reach youth early and provide them with hands on activities and experiences to gain skills and tools necessary to guide them on their path to success. Building Our Leaders Daily is the name of the Point Park University program. It features inspirational faces to the North Side through its “Today’s Mentors for Tomorrow’s Workforce” campaign, displaying posters with faces of mentors in an effort to show Black youth that people who look like them can be successful.
Add the many programs at CCAC and it appears to be a whole lot of programs out there to help young Black males and females move into careers instead of prison. How do we get the message out to our young people? Right now the message is not getting to them because our streets, not just Pittsburgh, but all over this country are still killing fields. Blood is being let at a record pace. Talk about the Middle East, our urban streets are looking much like these war zones and have been for years. Yet the so-called Black leaders in these cities still aren’t stepping up and speaking out.
It’s really great to see all these positive programs in Pittsburgh implemented to give our kids an alternative to the streets thus eliminating all the excuses our youths are giving for choosing to kill, maim and steal in the streets because they don’t have any other options. There are other options.
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Nationwide elections are coming Nov. 4 with most experts predicting that the Republicans will win the Senate and hold their own in the House. Other than the governor’s race in Pennsylvania, which most polls have Democrat Tom Wolf leading Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, there are no key contested races in Pennsylvania urban communities. So we shouldn’t waste our time going out to vote. Right? Wrong.
In every national poll voters say their biggest concerns are the economy and the gridlock in D.C. What they wanted most is getting the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, out of office. One big mistake the Democrats are making that Al Gore made back in 2000 is they are avoiding campaigning with the president. Gore avoided campaigning with President Clinton because of the sex scandals, but it hurt him more than it helped because people even back then were more concerned with the economy than who the president slept with. He lost the election. The same will be true this year if the Democrats don’t use the president’s positives to their favor. The positives are the growth of the economy, health care reform and no kids in foreign wars.
Sure the president’s rating is below 50 percent, but it’s far better than the Republican House ratings, which is below 30 percent by the general public.
Despite all the media coverage of Isis in Iraq and Syria, and the Middle Eastern fighting as a whole, most voters are concerned about the economy. It would be to the Democrats’ advantage if they focused on the growing economy, comparing it to when Obama took office. Another positive is health care. Despite all the negatives surrounding the Affordable Care Act at the beginning, most things appear to be working out very well even though there are still some problems that are being worked out. Overall it’s much better than what it was before he took office in 2009.
Now as far as Pennsylvanians, why should we vote? Because the governor’s race is critical. For the first time ever, I think, a governor may not serve two terms. Tom Corbett to my surprise is actually running behind Tom Wolf. Why, mostly because of his deep cuts in education and partly because he was one of the few governors who turned down federal money that would have helped in the transition to the Affordable Care Act.
The national election is still about President Obama, even though he’s not running. Blacks and Obama supporters need to come out in masses to tell the world that this country is in much better condition today than it was in 2008 and 2012 when Obama won both elections. And how much worse the country would have been if either of his opponents had won in those elections.
Despite zero help from the GOP, the economy is growing, health care is better, and very few of our young men or women are in harm’s way in Iraq, Afghanistan or any other country. That’s the bottom line.
(Ulish Carter is the managing editor of the New Pittsburgh Courier.)
