Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon.

From Boston Progress Radio

The photo you see here is pretty well-known: it’s of an anti-busing demonstration in Boston in 1977. Essentially, a white dude is using an American flag to attack a Black dude. It’s so deliciously perfectly ironic that it seems like a scene from a play.

Boston has a long history of violence, specifically as it relates to youth. The busing demonstration was made by people who didn’t want to see young Black children – we’re talking school-age children – going to school in white neighborhoods. Boston – both the city and the mindstate – are known to be racially and ethnically segregated. There is a lot of, I guess you could call them misunderstandings between youth from different neighborhoods.

I came of age in what is considered by a lot of folks as the Golden Era for Boston youth: the late 1990s. The dip in the youth homicide rate was so profound that it received national attention: the media dubbed it “The Boston Miracle” and President Clinton even swooped through the city’s roughest spots and congratulated community after community for keeping kids alive.

But as most folks in this region surely know by now, the miracle didn’t last. Youth violence has been – and continues to be – on the rise. The people who are in charge of discouraging this kind of thing have made references to how much it’s starting to feel like the early 90s again.

And there’s more than enough hard data to back up those claims, but I already knew we had problems just from paying attention to life.

In the summer of 2005, I was working with a grassroots organization with some of the dopest folks in town. One of the thing we did that summer was put on a conference about how to address youth violence. So I was out with my boy picking up some equipment to bring back to the conference. He got a call on his cell phone, and even only hearing one side of the conversation, I knew there was some trouble. After he hung up, I just asked him what the deal was, and he told me some older kids were threatening his 15 year-old brother and waiting for him outside his work.

I’m not going to get into the details, partially because it’s not my story alone to tell, but also because I don’t want anybody trying to guess who did or said what when or whatever. But the way the story comes to a close is me and my man, and about four other dudes – all of us in our 20s – leaving a youth violence conference to head over to his brother’s work ready to lay our hands on some 17 year-olds.

I can’t even front like there’s anything positive about this. Or I guess, I can say that the happy ending is that those kids had already left by the time we got there.

But when I hear pundits or parents berating the kids of today for being stupid and using violence as the answer, I want to ask them to dial it back. Of course, when something ends violently, then by definition it didn’t end well, but the sad truth is that it’s not that easy to simply not participate in your world.

We are all products of our times. If you’re 11 when bombs started falling again in Afghanistan and Iraq, now that you’re 16, how do you view the world? More than 80,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by the US, you know, the liberators. The heroes. The good guys. So how are we supposed to believe that violence isn’t the answer? It sure seems like it’s the answer…doesn’t it?

My friend mentioned to me yesterday that her son is younger than this War in Iraq. Maybe one day the violence there will be as much a foregone conclusion to him as it is to us that members of the American military rape girls and women in Okinawa regularly without punishment, or that Vieques is used as target practice, or that our government’s aggression will not cease as long as the fortune of our economy is tied to the dollar, which is tied to the control of the world’s resources.

You see, we shouldn’t be able to accept that these things happen. But we all have. We all know it, and something inside us must be hurting if we are able to maintain “normal” lives in this world.

When people around you are happy, it’s easier for you to be happy. When people around you are upset, then you’ll likely follow suit eventually. But when the world itself has gone mad, then why do we feign surprise when the rest of us react the same way?