Chicago and other urban areas are in crisis. In Chicago , 113 people have been killed this year -- a higher death toll than the troops have suffered in Afghanistan . The emergency is so dire that state legislators support calling out the National Guard to patrol Chicago 's streets. Guard members now in Afghanistan might return to a more dangerous assignment.
As Mayor Daley noted, the suggestion is a "Band-Aid" at best. The troops are not trained as police. They might suppress the pain, but couldn't relieve it. More likely, their presence would increase violence and fear, not alleviate it.
But the urgency behind the proposal is right. This is a crisis, not a condition. This year, 150 children have been shot -- 25 fatally. In the 16 months leading up to December 2008, Chicago averaged 32 shootings of children a year.
In the emergency posed by the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico , the national government has mobilized in response. But in the urban emergency that is today's Chicago -- and Detroit , and Los Angeles and Atlanta and more -- the situation is deteriorating without much response.
An emergency requires an urgent response. We do not stop to balance the budget before we send troops to
But there is no urgent response to
The president has created a commission to recommend action on the federal deficit. Yet deficits, for all the scare stories, are not an immediate emergency. The long-term debt projections are frightening, but they are due almost entirely to rising long-term health care costs. In the short term, deficits should go up rather than down to create jobs.
We need an emergency commission on the urban calamity, one that will detail a strategy for intervention. We need to hire more police to secure the streets, build schools and hire teachers, open training programs for young workers.
Our country must decide if this is an enduring condition or a crisis. The
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