Chris Powell: The wild ‘Kia Boyz’ may represent Conn.’s grim future

Downtown Bridgeport in 1912. Bridgeport was an industrial powerhouse for decades.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What may prove to be Connecticut's best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentary of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state's attention by CTCapitolReport.com.

Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages -- breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residential streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.

Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being "sold" to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can't be acquired legally.

Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public-housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperation with the regime.

Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particularly their lack of present fathers.

The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticut Kia Boyz, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdriver and USB cable.

It is hard not to see the Kia Boyz as the country's future -- the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can't educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal-justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisoning young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislators call "the help they need" without ever defining or delivering it.

What the Kia Boyz and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is  parents. But no one in authority in Connecticut dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particularly to fathers, and why. That's because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn't work or even makes things worse.]

Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusations of racism, since fatherlessness and poverty are racially disproportionate,.

So the country's nearly comprehensive abandonment of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and government budgets by the millions of immigrants illegally entering the country in recent years.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator from New York, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.

Moynihan wrote: "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved."

Six decades later Moynihan's prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).