It all began last spring, when State Representatives John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford called on Gov. Pat Quinn Sunday to deploy the Illinois National Guard to the 9% of city blocks where most of the city’s violent crimes occur, identified by Police Superintendent Jody Weis as “hot spots.”

Then in June Weis told parents of CPS students that police shouldn’t have to play parents out on the streets. Simple concept, right? Weis even met with gang leaders in August, threatening them with severe police pressure unless they stopped gang-related killings.

It all seemed to make some sense until Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Mark Kirk earlier this month suggested that the federal government should break up street gangs like it did back in the days of Al Capone.

Wait a minute: A Republican candidate asking the federal government to help stop the violence on city streets? And not just any city streets – the most violent in Chicago, where, in places like Lawndale, neighbors are pleading for federal help themselves.

Here’s my take, as someone who live all too close to a few of the neighborhoods in question:

Every one of these victims falls into one of two categories: Either he’s the intended target, or he’s standing next to the intended target.

None of these crimes is random; these people don’t come into neighborhoods where they don’t live. A lot of these crimes are retaliatory. They’re going to neighborhoods where a rival lives.

They won’t come into my neighborhood.

Plus I’ll never be a target in the first place: I don’t carry a gun. I don’t even own a gun. I don’t sell drugs. I don’t do drugs. In fact I’ve never even taken drugs. I don’t even smoke cigarettes. I live a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle with a wife, two kids and a dog, and on my block alone I am neighbors with Chicago police officers, Chicago firefighters, a Cook County Sheriff’s deputy and a Secret Service agent.

I live on a block that, despite the recession, has fared pretty well. Property values have gone down, yes, but certainly not like everywhere else. I live on a block where unemployment has affected my neighbors, but fortunately many of us have second job or spouse who works to get us through hard times.

I live on block that’s maintained very well by the city. Garbage pickup is on time. Street sweeping is on time. Kids walk to school and longtime residents walk their dogs.

We have tree-lined streets and local stores still in business.

Yet a couple miles to the east is a cemetery of sorts, where parts of Morgan Park – as well as Auburn Gresham and Englewood – are the unfortunate final resting place of some of the well above 300 people who have been killed in Chicago since Jan 1 – twice as many people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period.

If anyone is confused about what his job duty is, it’s gotta be a National Guardsman.

They’re the least-respected and the most banged-up, tossed around group of civil servants who don’t get the respect they deserve. They’re taken into flood zones, earthquake zones, war zones on foreign soil – and now war zones in their own cities. To do what?

Let me put it this way: Let’s say my wife and I work all day and we don’t have time for our kids except in the evenings. So we’re going to get a nanny and while we’re gone the nanny will deal with child. That way someone else can deal with him, can fulfill our responsibility to society and stop relying on other people to react to the problems that we have caused.

Hints of Bill Cosby? You bet. He said it 15 years ago, and people took offense to it then.

At what point are people in these neighborhoods where these crimes are being committed going to say: You know what, this is it; we’re done.

I don’t have any impact on these neighborhoods, and I can’t help the people of these neighborhoods.

Local radio loudmouth Ray Hanania likes to say that the people in the “white suburbs” aren’t affected by this, therefore they don’t care. In a way, Ray, you’re right. But I also don’t think people much care about the problems that I’ve created for myself in my own personal life.

It’s all about – here we go everyone! – personal responsibility. So yeah, it doesn’t affect me, so why should I worry about it? I don’t feel that my safety is at risk, that my comfortable lifestyle in Mt Greenwood is threatened, so what am I supposed to do to help?

They like to say there needs to be cultural change, and we don’t mean racial, we just mean cultural. Sorry Ray, you got it all wrong. There’s no cultural issue here.

It’s always someone else’s mess to clean up, isn’t it? There’s always someone else who has to jump in and clean up. I thought we were all about self-sufficiency in this country.

Obamapologists like to say that one of victories of his election is that young black kids can look up to him and say “I can be president, too.”

Well, that is a nice thought. But to change your life you’re gonna need more than just a role model. You’re going to have to desire to do better, to achieve greatness, to avoid being shot in the street. Your president did, and the only way that’s accomplished is by desiring it, but the problem is that desire isn’t given to you. It’s fostered by your parents and those who love you.

I’m tired of being told that this violence is everyone’s problem, that we can fix this if only we can all get along. I’m tired of being told it takes a village.

I participated in Hands Across America almost 25 years ago. And that didn’t change a thing. Why would this?