I sat and read a essay today.....on Molenbeek, Belgium....the ghetto where a large portion of Muslims now live on the west end of town. This is where all the excitement over the Brussels terror action was situated yesterday.
The population of this 'burb' rests at 93,000....more or less. This was a thriving area throughout the late 1700s and all the way to mid-1950s. Commerce and manufacturing made it a working-man's area. At some point in the late 1950s....they needed more manpower, so they allowed a fair number of North Africans to come in and take jobs. They didn't use the term multiculturalism in those days....it was simply work for money.
Depending on which analyst, journalist, or politician you talk to.....most will say that crime and bad behavior started up in the 1980s and never saw any real attention by the authorities or cops.
I read a comment by one retired cop from the region who said in simple language that this was a area that you just didn't get out as a cop and enforce the law.
The word 'ghetto'? Well, they use it often. If you go and look at pictures of the 'burb'....2.2 square miles, it's highly packed and dense. There are differing numbers over Muslims in the area. Some will say forty-percent.....some will say sixty-percent. Some people hint that some buildings may be officially listed as having 200 residents, and the truth is that there's 220 folks there....of which some folks are of Belgium or have a visa to be there.
So this essay came to this great question.....can you take down a ghetto? Can you just go and tell people that this neighborhood is too dense or populated, and force a quarter of the population to leave? Can you even go as far as ordering them to go more than just a mile or two.....but actually go forty miles away into some rural area? Well...no.
Most will argue now that Belgium has a problem of people being there.....without any real hope of employment, and they sit around to whine and complain about their wasted lives.
Oddly, I went to Wiki and looked at this one piece of curious history. You see....from Saint-Jans-Molenbeek....there are thirty-to-forty significant people from all walks of life who apparently never wasted their lives. These are writers, painters, scientists, actors, soccer players, singers, and professors. The thing you notice is that these are mostly all people born prior to the 1950s, and the bulk are long dead now. You could probably walk around this burb today...an area that you could walk from one end to another in about twenty minutes, and not find any kid whose destiny is life is worth writing much about.
What kind of solution can you dig up for Molenbeek? None.
As an American, it reminds me of Detroit. People stayed, even when Detroit was in the later stages of its destruction. People even stay in Detroit today.....waiting on some mythical recovery that will never come. The people in the ghetto region of Molenbeek? They are sitting there and waiting for the same mythical recovery. In their case.....one by one.....the young and naive will chat with others, and occasionally get all emphasized about some religious cause, then find themselves counting the hours of their life left to live.....dying for some fraudulent cause that seems to give them one last glimmer of purpose in life.
My suggestion? Go and cut social programs and easy money for the welfare class. Make them want to pack up and leave. That's about the only legit way of convincing people that recovery in this place is not possible, so give up and move elsewhere.....maybe a good distance elsewhere.
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