Marquette wants to stop violence,
yet teaches violence on campus

Today on the front page of the paper I read the headline Big names on west side join together. Being a lifelong West-side resident I was interested.

Reading the article I found out it was the ‘near west side’ they were talking about, the neighborhood around Marquette University. What the big names were seeking was ‘community prosecutor’ on site from the District Attorney’s office “to tackle issues including rundown housing, drug dealing and domestic violence. I started to get suspicious and then found out the Big name partners were Aurora Health Care, Harley-Davidson, Marquette University, MillerCoors and Potawatomi Business Development corporation all business on near West side or in the Menominee valley development that goes along river to downtown. They call the group PARC, Promoting Assets and Reducing Crime. I got more suspicious.

Then I read a quote from the President of Marquette University that said: “None of us alone can transform the neighborhood, but working together, we actually could get to the root of the problem.” I remember that some years ago Marquette University had purchased and developed all the land around the campus. They were displacing the poor and bringing in new housing for students and student friendly businesses. They were clipping along building a corridor around Marquette University until they go too bold and try to close down Wisconsin Avenue which runs through campus but is also is the main street in Milwaukee. Recently there has been a renewal of crime in the nearby neighborhood. The president’s statement got me more suspicious because Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives all know that getting to the roots of crime and downcast neighborhoods is now hiring a community prosecutor. As Governor Thompson’s, a governor known for building prisons, task force on crime and prisoners said many years ago: Prisoners and Prisons “are bound to grow as long as the root cause of crime—poverty, lack of education and lack of family support—go unaddressed.” Many persons throughout the years have pointed out the ‘root of poverty stricken neighborhoods around Marquette is Not hiring a special prosecutor on the site to prosecute crime.

Things took a turn to the ugly as I read on and saw that the Marquette University’s Center for Peacemaking will coordinate the combine efforts of this group to reduce crime. Marquette University hosts the regional military office training programs for all universities in Southeast Wisconsin. By their own admission the military, Department of Defense, teaches war, violence and reflex killing, killing without conscience on campus. Both the President and the Director of the Center for Peacemaking have refused to recognize these facts or even dialog about them.

The headline on the front page of newspaper read “Total loss of control”. The headline referred to Mayor’s comment on shooting of two innocent victims, calling the shooter having “a total loss of control, the total inability to control oneself in that setting, led to two more tragic deaths.” The mayor is describing how the military teaches how to kill at Marquette, using no control, firing weapon without thought or conscience on instinct or orders. As the ethics instructor at West Point testified to the military command “Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli—such as fire commands, enemy contact, or the sudden appearance of a “target”—and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy.” Is this not what the Mayor accuses the shooter of when he saw two persons standing over a two year old that had been accidentally run over by a car? This is what Marquette teaches, killing on reflex.

At the end of the article on PARC program the Mayor commended the effort calling it ‘proactive’ and ‘aggressive’. If I put all this together Marquette University needs control of a larger section of local neighborhoods to keep its student safe and has solicited some big businesses nearby to put up a million dollars to get the area its own prosecutors that will get at ‘root of crime’ prosecuting people in the neighborhood. This all makes as much sense as Marquette University Teaching War and Killing on campus. Maybe we can put both newspaper articles together and call it “Total loss of common sense and Christian values”.

Comments

Please send any comments on this post to . Let us know which day’s post your comments pertain to. If the comments are appropriate we will post them here for you.