t's amazing how a dramatic event can bring about an epiphany in the way one thinks about an issue.
As I surveyed the pile of glass that lay strewn near the base of my car last Friday, I knew that I was experiencing such an event.
Some time Friday night, someone decided that my beat-up old camera, a cheap car stereo and my former roommate's vacuum cleaner were reason enough to shatter not one but two of my car's windows.
For the past three months I have been living in a cramped efficiency apartment in downtown Brainerd. Not long ago I wrote a feature piece on the issue of young people hanging out. I rode with the cops, but I also hung out with the teens of my very neighborhood to get a feel for the depth of the true problem.
As a still wet-behind-the-ears recent college grad, I believed I was able to connect with the teens in a way that a middle-aged reporter would not. But despite my beliefs that the teens hanging out downtown are not entirely to blame for causing the problems, my instant venom upon seeing the pile of glass was directed at the group as a whole.
"Those kids did it," was my initial thought.
In that instant I realized how easy it is to place the blame for the problems downtown on a group of teens. A group of people who are unlikely to put up a major fight for their image. Throughout history it has been true that it is easier to blame problems on under-represented classes than address the issues at hand.
In frontier days, eradicating the American Indians because they were perceived to be savages was much easier than admitting they were living on a valuable "new" land mass. During the Cold War it was easier to convince America that a great war machine was needed to protect the public from the "Evil Empire" than it was to say that defense spending and threat of war helped fuel a shaky economy.
Kids aren't the problem in the Brainerd downtown. Criminals are.
We can write ordinance after ordinance until finally it will be illegal for kids to be in a group larger than two in any public place, but I think the acts would be futile.
Rather than continuing to alienate our own next generation, what Brainerd needs to begin to recognize is that we're not a little city on the prairie anymore. The price we will pay for the increase in tourists and the modern conveniences they bring is an upswing in the criminal element that accompanies progress.
For right or wrong, the correlation between crime and population is easy to see. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and have long been associated with major crime. Nisswa, Leader and Cuyuna have not.
