Virtually any effective self-help book and especially Oprah asks the viewer/reader to look at yourself first before you begin the transformation. The key is how you do that. How you measure yourself before and after the transformation.

To me, no self-help approach will work without answering the question, “Who knows me better than me?” I had a transforming moment at the age of twelve when I was crying in total frustration in our garage because of the manipulations of a bi-polar mother whose constantly changing messages on my character were confusing me on the soundness of her love for me and myself. I decided that the only way I could survive was to stop letting anyone tell me who I am because I know myself far better than anyone else can or ever could.

It is our thinking, not our emotions that control the way we see the world. When you stop comparing yourself to others in measuring success or failure, you now can measure where you are at and where you want to be. That does not mean that you ignore advice and help offered by others including the self-help gurus. It means that only you can decide what ideas are worthy of using or discarding.

Let me offer an example through a realization I made while giving a parenting workshop for women at a battered women’s shelter. The signal issue was how to stop letting a husband or parent or child or friend who you loved stop behaving in a way that was driving you crazy. The answer I came up with for those psychologically tattered women was the one that had worked for me and it is the difference between want and need. I may want that abusive husband who I tried so hard to change and become the person he is capable of being so that he will love me in the way that would make both of us happy, but I don’t need him to change to love myself and be happy with my life.

In that way you have taken full responsibility for your life without succumbing to blaming other people or things. When you have dropped the need to be dependent on others so that you can live up to the message they are sending you about yourself, you control your future and can measure your successes and failures.

“Black neighborhoods are held hostage by dealers and police and the white clients glide through undisturbed.” flyover52

“The result is to turn thousands of young men into economic cripples and to give the crime wave in Newark a flood of fresh recruits. Booker describes it as almost an economic genocide against African-American men in his city.” Tom Moran, Star Ledger

“The cities and their residents have to take a long hard look at themselves and take at least a measure of responsibility for the state they are in.” AnthonyB

We have not gone far from the plantations, when we still have psychological slavery through our prisons. We know drugs create a mental prison and we keep using almost all of our money to house the ill in a prison of the mind and body in a place where the ill can learn how to improve their techniques to remain trapped. We do the same thing in the communities where the condemned come from. What rational person would believe we can continue to be so stupid?

I applaud Mayor Booker for having the guts to say he is going to change things at the fundamental level. However, I’m not sure he is going deep enough with what I have read of his and others’ proposed solutions. I admit that as a recovering white racist raised in North Dakota, others understand the situation in Newark and our depressed communities far better than me. What I don’t see being mentioned other than by Bill Cosby or to some extent Barack Obama is the underlying cause beneath the drugs, poverty and poor schools.

The slave owners used violence to rule and the slave had to eat his anger to survive. That suppressed anger magnificently came out as a very useful tool during the civil rights movement when men, women, and children said, “I am mad as hell and won’t take it any more.”

I watched on TV last night and saw Johnny Cash’s famous ‘60s concert at San Quentin prison and the audience was virtually all white. These white prisoners were there because of poverty and their understanding of how violence was the only way to solve problems. Now the great majority of prisoners are black and brown. These black and brown prisoners are there because of drugs, poverty and their understanding of how violence is the only way to solve problems.

That is the crux of my fundamental depth argument. The communities where these men and women come from have to look at how children are raised. When violence is used to control children, they learn that violence is the only way to solve problems and stand up for yourself. If you are disrespected, you do what you have to do to keep your respect. These children are not aware of how this violence versus respect game keeps them from escaping their trapped existence throughout their lives. When we offer solutions, we need to solve the underlying problem as well as the symptoms.

If your post isn’t an editor’s choice selection then that only confirms that people aren’t paying enough attention to the basic problem that you have outlined so well. Until enough people get what you are saying, these communities will tragically remain a village of victims.