This is Patrick McIlheran at his best.

He deconstructs Barbara Miner's maudlin account of a bus ride along North Avenue, with this trenchant analysis.

The question isn’t why we tolerate these inequities so much as why we tolerate the personal dysfunction that is behind them. I suggest it’s because what we find more intolerable would be the kind of intrusiveness into the lives of the very poor that could help them become as prosperous as most Americans are. We cannot bring ourselves to forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school. We won’t mandate a longer time horizon, a change in personal outlook, a resulting ambition to learn a useful career at MATC.

I don’t know that we should. I do know this, though: The question of North Ave. is not how it can be that some have so much while others on the same street have so little. Rather, it is why some fail to do the fairly simple things — stay in school, delay childbearing until marriage, learn a skill to permit employment — that most Americans of every race, ancestry and neighborhood manage to do, making them middle-class and relentlessly affluent.