If communities are going to overcome poverty, soaring out-of-wedlock birth rates, and high incarceration rates, the change has to come from within those communities themselves. People need to take responsibility for their lives instead of relying on the next government program to bail them out. Real solutions have to come from inside, via the long, hard work of changing community standards and morals. Extracting handouts from the government has done little to aid poor communities and everything to aid the people channeling the handouts. These communities are being exploited by their supposed advocates, and many of the advocates know it.
If a child growing up in these conditions is not taught to take responsibility for his own life, to claim his life as his own, to work to live a better, more productive life than those he grew up observing, then he risks falling into that same rudderless existence. That failure to take personal responsibility for one’s fate, I theorized, is the enemy within.
—from Late Admissions by Glenn Loury, chapter 11.
