Don’t fall into “the ET trap”
Út 20 prosince 2005
There is a trap in thinking about the Boston miracle, and I think that so far (to the best of my knowledge) all researchers trying to understand what is (what was?) going on did fall in it. I would call it “the ET trap” (ET as “The Entertainment Tonight” one of the most stupid celebrity obsessed shows on the US TV) and it goes like this: “… there are some interesting people trying to do something interesting (or merely claiming to do something interesting) and here are the results—see the heroes who made the change!” Yes, I return still back to the question, how much actually mattered to the average kid on the street of Roxbury that Revs. Hammond, Rivers, and Brown had been talking with officials of the Boston Police Department? And I still cannot find an explanation, why it would matter that much, especially in the short-run.
But maybe there is a good very long-term process going on here of the redefinition of the identity, but that couldn’t make a change so prominent in so short time.