IT'S EVERBODY'S FAULT...but mine

"Society's fault? No. Nobody put the crack into the pipe, nobody made you smoke away your life."

:Ice T "You Played Yourself"


This morning while listening to a morning show on an R&B station that goes out of it's way to define "blackness" (whatever that means today) I found myself bombarded by pro black messages, some positive some negative. Though I'm not a morning person by ANY stretch my BS filters are particularly well tuned first thing in the morning and the show in question seems to sound like "black black blickity black black...'How you feeling this morning Ted?'

'I'm BLACK Phil...I am black.' Anyway while listening to this interspersed with sparse offerings of hip hop, classic R&B and the nauseating begging for sex that has BECOME R&B I heard a social commentary on street gangs killing civilians in street violence in Chicago and how some were asking for the National Guard to be called in. I listened more intently and the velvety voiced female commentator she went on to say that the problem should have been stopped at it's roots. I couldn't help but agree. No one wakes up one morning and decides to join a gang, begin selling drugs and shooting at people. It happens over time.
She then went on to say that part of the problem stems from the fact that young black and Latino males need places to feel as if they belong and are respected and gravitate to gangs because the government has failed on some level to provide sufficient programs for them and that the chasm between rich and poor have driven them to it.
At that point I was glad I wasn't in the studio with this woman as her argument was the reason someone invented hip waders...chest deep BULLSHIT. Bad neighborhoods are nothing new and neither are gangs and thugs. I grew up in a big city and there were gangs and drugs but the bulk of us didn't belong to a gang? Why? I can't speak for my friends, but in MY case my father was a contractor and always had work to be done. He had me out on a job site whenever I didn't have an activity.
Activities? There was cub-scouts, Pee-wee football, baseball and just old fashioned getting a ball and playing with your friends. If you didn't have an activity the best reason NOT to join a gang was the thought of your mom and or dad cutting a switch from the nearest large tree or taking a worn leather belt and taking a layer of black off your "narrow black ass" as they so frequently put it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for government programs that encourage programs to get young people to do constructive things in their spare time. When I was a kid they offered a myriad of programs at my local park and there were other programs which I took part in which cost next to nothing.
My parents were working class and never let me forget that for a second and I understand that there are people in my old neighborhood who are so poor they can barely afford food for their children. But honestly there are some things you can get your children to do which don't cost any money. How much does it cost to take your kid to the park and push him/her on a swing? How much does it cost to go for a walk with your son or daughter? How much of your weekly income is taken by simply offering your child praise and encouragement?
Government programs are great, but they are NOT the ultimate solution. Psychologist have shown in study after study that the type of person your child will become is shaped by the time he/she is 2 years old. That being said, if you don't curtail certain things your kid does while he's still a kid, you will soon have an adult on your hands who has no respect for you or anything else. The end result my generation (the lovable losers known as "Generation X" are raising a group of lazy, violent, disrespectful, thugs incapable of using simple logic who have an ungodly sense of entitlement. Who can we blame for it? No one but ourselves.
Mike Rutherford once said "Every generation blames the one before" and to that end Gen X blames our parents as they blamed theirs in the 60s and 70s, and our grandparents blamed their parents in the great depression. But let's stop for a moment and take stock as we look at the lazy, disrespectful, semi-literate, logic impaired, recreational drug using, oversexed, tattooed youth that we've spawned and stop passing the buck. This is entirely our fault and the time has come to come up with some solutions and preventative measures to insure that our grandchildren (some of whom might either be with us now or on the way shortly) don't fall into the same trap we obliviously led this current generation into as we pointed the fingers of blame.

The Scrapbook

One day when I was nine years old, I was hanging out with my buddy Demontrion at his house on a Saturday afternoon. In the far corner of his room near the window was a closet which he scarcely opened back then. Years later when we were in high school and he became the clothes horse/ladies man he's notorious for being now, it would simply be the closet that was too small to accommodate it's fair share of his trendy clothes which seemed to go in and out of style as quickly as he put them on.

The houses in South Park where we had grown up had been "G.I." housing. By G.I. housing, I mean that at the end of World War II when the veterans returned home to the heroes' welcomes they'd earned along with G.I. home loans, men with expanses of land built neighborhoods with similar floor plans and sold them to returning soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines. If you were to drive through my old South Park neighborhood you would note that most of the streets are named after generals and battle fields. The streets have names like "Doolittle" , "Iwo Jima", "Tarawa" and "Ridgeway."

Demontrion's grandfather whom I'd never met served in the Navy in the second world war and made a career of it and Demontrion's uncle Johnny did the same. His dad on the other hand had joined the Marines. He never talked about his war experiences when we were coming up, but as we grew older and learned what happened over there, we realized that we'd been reading the war on his face our entire lives. He was a quiet man who didn't speak unless he had something to say. Honestly to this day when he talks I find myself listening as if I'm still a little kid. He's always been one of my heroes thought I doubt I've ever told him.

Demontrion's parents were divorced and he lived with his grandmother. The room he had, had been the one his father and uncle shared. When his father returned from Southeast Asia, he hung up the dress blue uniform that Marines seldom wear, (but always seem to be photographed in whenever they do) in a closet along with a sea-bag full of mementos, one of which being a scrap book never thinking for a moment that ten years later they would sever as curiosities to his son and his best friend on a restless afternoon. We found a worn scrapbook full of black and white photos. There were pictures of his dad, but we had difficulty recognizing him. Neither of us had ever seen him without a beard or at least a mustache.

The photos were mostly of his dad and the other Marines in the unit in which he'd spent two years. They were young men, I'm assuming between 19 and 23 who had the tired eyes of old men. There were pictures in the jungles, small villages, and bares that we all find synonymous with what we know of Vietnam, but there was one photo that stuck in my mind. My best friend's father at 19 was sitting on a big rock calmly looking into the distance and smoking a cigarette. The photo would hardly seem unusual were it not for the small khaki clad figure in the background who had been crucified. We couldn't see the man's face, but he wore khaki and a pith helmet that we would later learn had been the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army.

I found it neither funny, nor disturbing. Honestly, neither I nor my best friend had any idea what we were really looking at. The crucified NVA wasn't real to us, he was merely a glossy black and white image in a photo. We didn't understand the two men in the photo. One the victor, the other the vanquished. They were members of an odd fraternal order of mutual respect. The fraternity of men who've exchanged gunfire. Before they entered a cluster of jungle that became a battle field, they were two highly trained, well armed, teenage boys who had been armed to the teeth and sent out to obliterate one another. Their differences? One grew up a military brat in Houston, Texas his father a proud Navy man who had served in the Pacific, the other had probably been raised in Hanoi hearing about how bravely his father and possibly his mother had fought against the French in the last war.

The two boys met in a battle that probably lasted minutes but seemed like a week and in the end, one got to go home and the other was "sent" home.

I would join the Marines after high school, learn more ways of breaking and utterly destroying other human beings that I would ever care to know, but I would never be sent to test those martial skills against some other teenage "patriot" fighting for HIS country. Demontrion and I never peered into the scrapbook again. I can't speak for Demontrion, but I think on some level we probably felt it just didn't seem "right." It wouldn't dawn on me until years later that we probably didn't venture to open it again, because on some level we knew that not being members of the "fraternity" we weren't worthy.