"What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?"

Charlie LeDuff of Mother Jones has written an in-depth article about current events in Detroit and how Detroit got to where it is. Read through to the end, and you'll find that he finishes with a couple of paragraphs that explain better than I can why I can't listen to WHYY 90.9 FM any more:

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can't keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist's match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children's milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn't manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation's children with a burden of debt? Can she be blamed for that?

[ ... ]

I left McNeal's porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and A Prairie Home Companion came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the windshield at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over, and switched it off.

Spend your coffee break reading it, and don't get lost following the bouncing links to the articles and websites LeDuff cites to.