“‘Enough is enough,’ thundered Newark mayor Cory Booker at Saturday’s funeral of Dashon Harvey. The weekend before Dashon, age 20, and two of his friends had been forced to kneel against a wall at a nearby school playground and shot in the head, execution-style. Dashon had been a student at Delaware State University, eventually hoping to become a social worker. City Journal commentator Steven Malanga reveals the social pathology that lies behind those murders: ‘An astonishing 60 percent of the city’s kids are growing up without fathers. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.’ Just hours before Mayor Booker was venting his outrage, Robert Pedersen, divorced father of two, was preparing to depart on a 700-mile bicycle trek from Lansing, Michigan to Washington, DC. His objective: to share his story at an August 18 rally in honor of Family Preservation Day.” (08/20/07)