Black America: Damned if We Do, Damned if We Don’t

 

Nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee loved basketball.  He took that ball with him everywhere he went.  He took it into that Chicago alley on Monday, November 2, 2015 when Chicago police say gang members lured him there in order to murder him.

Nine years old.

Tyshawn’s “crime?”  He had the bad sense to choose as his father a man who police say is probably involved with a lethal gang called the Gangster Disciples.  Apparently, Pierre Stokes, Tyshawn’s “chosen” father, has done something so terrible to this rival gang, they felt it only appropriate to execute his child.  Take THAT, Pierre!

http://abcnews.go.com/US/murder-year-chicago-boy-killed-alleged-gang-related/story?id=35020452

As I have come to expect, and so should you, the gentle people of America who despise the Black Lives Matter movement have crawled out of their self-righteous hidey-holes to decry the black community’s failure to curb this insane slaughter that holds hostage Chicagoans and Baltimoreans and Fergusonians and the people of every other urban city where poverty has been studiously concentrated, by design.  The people who are first in line to scream “black on black” crime as a reason to NOT support efforts to stop police departments to prey upon unarmed black people are the same people who fled their once lily-white, lower-middle-class neighborhoods as soon as one dark-skinned family moved in. 

Let me be perfectly clear.  There is no reason whatsoever for a grown-ass man or woman to plan the execution of a 9-year-old.  I hope the assholes who planned this murder will be snuffed out as quickly and as easily as little Tyshawn was.  I don’t even care who does it.  The police would be preferable, because that would be somewhat more lawful.  However, in all likelihood, it will be the result of Gangster Disciple retaliation, because that’s what criminals do. Besides, the police don’t seem to be able to do much of anything in the ‘hood about real crime.

Yes, I said criminals.  People who belong to gangs are willful breakers of the law. They are outlaws who don’t even believe in laws unless they are the laws of the streets, which they determine.  But just like in the communities of other skin colors, these criminals do not represent the black community.  They are the scourge of the black community.

So why don’t we put a stop to it?

We tried.  We’ve been trying.  In fact, we tried so hard in the late 1960s we actually precipitated the draconian drug laws that now have a large percentage of our black men and women sitting in penal institutions for terms far longer than those for some far more heinous crimes. 

When the concentrated poverty of inner cities across the nation began to cause serious social problems, especially the introduction of drugs as both a profession and a palliative to the grinding poverty, law-abiding residents in those locations started screaming to high heaven for protection.  They went to the place where we have always thought protection was supposed to be provided – the police and the government.  Black leaders pushed hard to bring “law and order” back to their communities.  And the conservatives in power at the time took that political football and ran with it.  They pulled an end-zone-to-end-zone touchdown. 

And thus began the new Jim Crow. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/opinion/the-real-roots-of-70s-drug-laws.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=1

Have you ever wondered why we hear hardly more than crickets from today’s  black leadership about this terrifying coup d'état taking place in Chicago? For your answer, look no further than the All Lives Matter contingent.  As soon as the black community publicly denounces what The Others like to call black-on-black crime in any meaningful way, the heat is immediately lifted from the excessive force and brutality that is plaguing our people.  In fact, the knee-jerk government reaction to any hue and cry from law-abiding black people could easily result in another fully-sanctioned open season on blacks.

The black community, most of which is concentrated in overcrowded, underfunded and crumbling environments, is between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

White people are truly sick of hearing about how slavery started all this.  That’s really unfortunate, because until such time as the majority of white people accept that as truth, these manifestations of oppression will only get worse.  It took hundreds of years to get there, but once the creation of sprawling black ghettos was completed, the rest was absolutely predictable.  But Americans don’t have time to think ahead.  We don’t know how to analyze a problem to include the consequences of the chosen solution.  We are so busy placing blame, quieting consciences and running for lucrative government offices, we don’t seem to care much about consequences.  Everything is about right now.  And this is the now we have created.

When I began to write this piece, I was really angry with a woman named Karla Lee. She was the one who made the ill-advised choice to allow a gangster to father her child.  She should have been smarter than that.  She should have seen the danger her son was in and protected him.  She is just as worthless…

And then I came to my senses.  She is as much a product of this social malfunction as Pierre Stokes and his fellow Gangster Disciples are. The rules of conduct those of us who are so quick to pass judgment live by have little or nothing to do with the social order in Islands of Poor Black Concentration.  Our rules don’t and never have worked for those residents.  They can’t even escape their hell on Earth through education, as we once believed.  Their schools are nothing more than holding tanks for mass incarceration.  Their secondary education is not college, it is the penitentiary.  If and when they ever leave, they graduate as fully-socialized predators and survivors. 

It is going to take more minds than black minds to stop the civil wars in our cities.  It is going to take more than the prayers black churches send up every Sunday.  It is going to take an awakening of the magnitude we only read about in stories of miracles. 

Do I believe in miracles?  Do you?

Papa Francisco and Me

 

“Go, the Mass has ended.”

The last time I heard those words from the altar of a Catholic Church was at a funeral in the late 1990s.  Although I can almost recite an entire Catholic Mass in Latin, I really thought I had lost whatever it was I had in the way of warm-fuzzies about Catholicism.

I didn’t even know the Pope was coming to the United States until he actually got here. After he arrived in Washington, it occurred to me that I actually had heard rumblings as I did my usual multi-tasking with the news broadcasting mutedly in the background.

My status of “recovering Catholic” began in college, when I started learning about life outside the Thou-Shalt-Nots of my parochial schooling,.  One definite no-no was attending non-Catholic church services, so it never occurred to me to learn about other religions. I thought that was probably a sin, too.

The media’s real or feigned excitement about the comings and goings of the popular (even to me) Pope Francis must have been contagious because I found myself glued to the television as if we were back during the time when President Kennedy was taken from us so suddenly. I found myself responding positively to the man who is Pope. I couldn’t take my eyes off him or take my attention away from his words.  His quiet, leisurely speech delivery, instead of being boring, was soothing, almost relaxing.  His pure joy when interacting with the people in the streets, far more so than the dignitaries he was forced to greet and indulge, was transfixing.  This man embodied everything I had imagined as a small child sitting in a hard, highly-polished pew listening to the Pope’s message at Sunday Mass. 

As I sat and whiled the day away on Friday, the second day of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States, I did what the nuns always demanded when any of their pupils misbehaved: I examined my conscience.  What was going on with me, the self-described atheist who believes organized religion to be a sinister influencer of world conflict?  Me, the person who spent three weeks in Europe exploring dozens of grandiose cathedrals that dripped with gold, silver, rubies, emeralds and pearls.  All this excess seemed so far removed from the teachings of Jesus Christ, from the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience taken by the Dominican nuns who shaped my understanding of Catholicism. I kept thinking, while being mesmerized by stained glass windows of overwhelming detail and beauty, how the lives of many suffering people of the world could have been made comfortable if this wealth had been distributed among them.

Popes were individuals of unmatched status to the child I was in the 1950s, when I attended St. James Catholic School in my home town of Maywood, Illinois.  They ruled over more people than the President of the United States.  Their word, according to church doctrine, was infallible, and at the time I thought that meant on all subjects.  My attention may have wandered to the Stations of the Cross which encircled the sacristy during the Homily and the Sunday Sermon, but I never dreamed through a reading of a papal encyclical. My young mind believed my attention to his words was imperative to my salvation.

As I grew older, however, I read of Popes who were nothing like what I expected them to be.  Pope Alexander VI – Rodrigo Borgia of Spain – was elected Pope in 1492, a significant year in American history.  His conduct during his reign that ended with his death in 1503 was about as far removed from my expectations as one could get and still bear the title.  He observed the rules against papal marriages, but that didn’t stop him from siring several children among a number of mistresses, the most famous of whom may be his daughter Lucrezia Borgia.  Talk about a rude awakening!  My imagery of papal deportment was shattered into shards of broken vows and self-centered humanity.  Thus began my journey toward atheism.  It took decades to evolve to its current level of certainty, but those early exposures to real history, and not the highly romanticized history I learned in parochial school, put me on the path.

When the Papal Mass at Madison Square Garden neared the point at which the Pope would utter the words that opened this essay, I found myself saddened a little that it was over.  I realized at that point that my psyche associated the sights and sounds of Catholic ritual with the profound sense of peace I felt whenever I attended such a ceremony.  Even the scent of incense, which actually nauseated me when I was a smaller child, would have been an olfactory trigger of the feeling of being centered and safe, had I been there in person.

My faith, such as it was, hasn’t been reawakened by this string of papal events.  I am firm in my belief that heaven and hell are achieved in life, not in death.  I continue to abhor the pain and suffering religious zealotry has caused humanity since the beginning of time.  What I do have is a new understanding of the role religions can and do play for individuals trying to find their ways through a chaotic and unpredictable life.  When one believes there is a power that overrides one’s own, there can be comfort in throwing the fear of the unknown into the hands of the superior being. 

I often tell people that I was never really given the gift of faith.  I seem to have been in line when the other two virtues, hope and charity, were bestowed, but I obviously missed the day faith was offered.  Sometimes I feel regretful about that because I must rely solely upon myself to make it through this crazy life.  But I haven’t lost the ability to feel the wonderment, the temporary peace and the serenity offered by Catholic ritual.  I was surprised by this, although I probably shouldn’t have been.  The teachings of Catholicism shaped my way of being in this life.  When I hear a siren out in the distance, to this day, I have the urge to make the sign of the cross, which was something we were taught to do in school.  I still care about that person who is being whisked to the hospital or who is a victim of crime.  I even care about the person who might be in trouble with the police. 

And, when I pay attention to the ear worms that invade my distracted thoughts, I find myself humming and, often, singing liturgical hymns, most of which are associated with happiness and joy. 

I guess the old saw applies here, too.  You can take the woman out of Catholicism but you can’t take Catholicism completely out of the woman.