Sharks will soon feel at home in the region

Sharks have been a part of the Mahoning Valley’s life since time immemorial. There have been loan sharks, card sharks, political sharks and even business sharks.

And, there have been infamous Valley residents who were fed to the sharks — O.K., they were said to be swimming with the fishes — after being on the losing end of a Mafia battle.

Thus, it was a homecoming of sorts for the seven sharks who arrived from California Tuesday to take up residence in an aquarium in the Eastwood Mall. They are sharing the 4,500-gallon digs with eels, stingrays and other tropical fish. Their home even has a unique name: E-Quarium. The E is for Eastwood.

But while the 5-foot white tip reef, marble cat, black tip reef and leopard sharks are confined to their shopping center habitat, there other sharks — of the human kind — stalking their prey in the Valley on a daily basis.

The most dangerous species today are the drug gangbangers who have indulged in a feeding frenzy, particularly in the city of Youngstown, for the past several years. It’s time they were confined to steel aquariums, or better yet, rendered extinct.

Until the streets of the city are made safe, the revitalization goals contained in Youngstown 2010 will be all the more difficult to attain.

Politics

Then there are the political sharks who go into attack mode any time an effort is made to change their gluttonous behavior.

Regional government? You’ve got to be kidding. Wage freeze? Get real. Higher co-payments for health insurance — or any co-payments? When hell freezes over.

It doesn’t matter that the population of the Mahoning Valley is shrinking, that high-paying jobs in the private sector are being replaced by minimum wage ones, and that taxpayers who aren’t on the public payroll are being forced to shell out even more of their limited resources so government can operate. The sharks, who already gobble more than 80 percent of the operating budgets of most public entities, have insatiable appetites. They want more. And they want to make sure nothing interfers with their very lucrative retirement packages.

This state of affairs is no longer tenable. Major changes have to be made in the way government operates. Regional government, consolidation of services, central purchasing and even a reduction in workforce are the answer.

The Regional Chamber is preaching regionalization, but its effort will fall short unless there is a citizen uprising. Taxpayers can no longer sit quietly while their limbs are being torn from their bodies — figuratively speaking, of course — by the political sharks.

Finally, there are the young sharks who have turned neighborhoods and school systems into their hunting grounds. Their goal is to disrupt the lives of honest, law-abiding citizens.

In the schools, they have no interest in learning and their presence in the classrooms serves only to cause anxiety among serious students and even teachers. When some punk with a juvenile criminal record stands up to authority, it’s not a fair fight — especially when one of the contestants had his or her hands tied.

These predators must be rounded up in the schools and sent off to some far away place where the law of the wild applies. They do not belong in civil society.

A waste of money

While such action may seem extreme, there is no other solution to this attack on the system. It is ridiculous — and a waste of money — to permit young people who have no desire to improve themselves to undermine the education of others.

The recent fight at Youngstown’s Chaney High School and the report last week of a 12-year student in Warren assaulting a teacher are reminders of the challenges confronting educators in urban America.

In the neighborhoods, these social misfits cause law-abiding citizens to fantasize about the punishment that should be administered — but never will.

As for the loan sharks, the dismantling of the Mafia in the Mahoning Valley has made the tried-and-true practice of “kneecapping” the stuff of coffee shop conversations. But our infamous bent-nose residents would certainly find poetic justice in the many payday loan businesses that have sprung up in the area.

Yes, the sharks are still among us — inside the tank and out.