Lives of Desperation
Those who live in the ghettoes across the globe, including the ghettoes in America, have often been a major quandary for me in any search for the meaning of life. I have, for some time, lost most of the earlier braggadocio about my own quality of life. It is not that people cannot take any credit for bettering themselves in various ways, it is just that the vast majority of the affluent/successful start off with extremely important unearned advantages. If I had been born in certain countries, in certain places, in certain times, with altered genetics---my chances of living the life I now live would have been close to zilch. Of course some, with no or little advantages early in life, do manage to escape. But even then it often has to do with mental or physical advantages, being at the right place at the right time, etc. Self made is not the play maker we often pretend.
My profession brought me into situations where I got a peripheral view of the whole ghetto 'business'. There is nothing remotely simple about the feelings, mindset, priorities, and behavior of those who live in these horrific environments. There is nothing remotely easy about any solution. There is nothing remotely clear as to how to slide, even the best of them, into being a successful and productive citizen.
You do, if you allow yourself to get at all close to them, gain a lot of empathy with them, an empathy which those at a greater distance will rarely achieve. What we affluent do is to wall ourselves off as far as possible from them, and gate ourselves into safer more prosperous communities. In America, we lock the less fortunate up in greater percentage numbers than any other place on earth. We call this law and order. Of course any society needs law and order, but it needs to be just---and that means paying as much attention to crime prevention as we do to the crime punishment which results from the inattention. We don't even try much to do that. Politicians don't gain votes for preventive measures, all of which cost money, but gain votes by promising stiffer jail sentences. Ironically, the $30,000 per year jail costs far exceed the costs of most preventive measures.
Be all that as it may, it has always intrigued me how these less fortunate people think and feel and behave. A book by Viktor E. Frankl, a survivor of 4 different Nazi death camps, has helped me apply his observations of Nazi prison life to ghetto life. Of course life in downtown Detroit or Newark is not the same as a Nazi death camp, but one is an extension of the other. In both cases the inhabitants have lost considerable control over their own destiny. To be a child in a dangerous neighborhood, with bars on the the windows and doors, with a dysfunctional family, poor schools, poor health care, poor diet, etc. is to be trapped mentally into a 'death' camp of a different sort. There may be no gas chamber looming on the immediate horizon, but there is a degree of hopelessness and no seemingly apparent path to betterment. I guess we need UNDERSTAND that abnormal behavior in abnormal situations is NORMAL. In any normal environment it is ABNORMAL for a young person to maliciously assault another person over little things. It is not abnormal, in the sense of being unexpected, in the ghetto. In the death camps, the inmates often lost the emotions of disgust, horror and pity that they may once have had in abundance. In the ghetto the same emotions can be lost, or maybe never acquired---essentially for the same reasons. In a death camp, everything tends to lose value except survival. In our ghettoes, for many of the young (and old), a lot of the values which we cherish, they may lose---except for the desire to survive. And that too, in some cases, is lost.
It is hard to respect others when hardly anyone, and in many cases no one, has any respect for you. I can't count, how many times, as a kid, I was made to feel important by someone or something I did. There are often not a whole lot of respect or feelings of accomplishment to be found in ghetto environments. For a young person in such a setting, the lack of such enriching contributions to emotional and ethical growth come at at time when his/her character and emotional nature is being formed.
Just as SOME of the prisoners at the Nazi prison camps were able to maintain a minimal sense of humanity throughout the ordeal, some youngsters in ghetto environments do well, and sometimes even excel in the areas of ethics, values, and priorities. In the prison camps it is often past memories of loved ones which provide the hope and strength to endure. For a youngster in a ghetto it is often the love and protected attention given by someone---a parent, a grandparent, a teacher----who gives them the strength to endure. Without that kind of targeted love and attention I can't really recall too many success stories. People really do build people. The price of irresponsible reproduction IS PAID BY these defenseless offspring. Those most adamant about bringing all fetuses to term are the very ones least supportive of tax measures to provide any kind of government support for these kids, and are the very ones who prate on about family values---which translated always refers to THEIR OWN family values.. It is not anyone else's family or family values which are much on their minds. These other kids get poor schools, poor health care, poor security, poor opportunities for jobs, for play or travel, and little exposure to varied social settings.
Even those children given admirable support from a family member or teacher etc. are most often stunted in how far they really go in life. The struggles are so difficult, so relentless, and so stymied at every step, that once they gain minimal accomplishments, the race for them is over. It becomes more a case of enough is enough, something is better than what he/she had. To genuinely know any of these young people, to understand their thoughts and amazing personal qualities, is to be saddened by their eventual limited career or financial success. They escape the ghetto, but barely. The rewards rarely match their efforts.
I never could really accept or get used to these pictures from life's other side. I can't really estimate the percentage of young people in the ghetto who have been irreversibly damaged by their circumstances. I understand God's evolutionary process evolves ever upward, not just in physical complexity, but in human social values, human priorities, and human responsibility. Ghetto environments are throwbacks, a regression in time for human culture. With human overpopulation now in full press across the globe, ghettoes multiply disproportionately to population growth. Affluent societies HAVE REAL REASON to fear these ghettoes, and with terrorism now available as an effective tool to channel their anger, all of us, with much to lose and to protect, are beginning to witness Mother Nature resolving what humans are not yet capable of generating---responsible reproduction and social responsibility for all fellow human beings.
If evolution provides anything it provides hope and faith that the future, in the big picture, will continue to improve with Time. Even in the Nazi prison camps there was always real hope for those willing to cling to it----such hope acquired not by the many, but by the few, and these few---the survivors---become the agents of evolutionary growth. Survival of the fittest works, the evolutionary progress is self evident. But the victims are many, a difficult and depressing spectacle. What is unknown are the consequences for those affluent who contribute, by their actions or inactions, to the injustices which abound. All of us everywhere understand the Golden Rule. Maybe not many in the ghetto understand, whose values and priorities are often warped by their circumstances, but those of us enjoying an affluent life understand the Golden Rule and choose, each of us, to embrace or ignore this concept to varying degrees. At this point human understanding is too limited. We know so little about life, something which we all experience for years, and to know anything about life after death, judgment, rewards, punishments, etc. is simply beyond human grasp.
What struck me the most about young people from our own ghettoes is how isolated they really are. Most of them have never been more than a few miles from their home, except maybe on a rare group trip to a museum or a bused trip to some affluent camp or school for charitable 'adventures'. These bused 'adventures' are expensive and well meant, but are done mostly to make the sponsors feel good about themselves. Nothing wrong with that but the end result is often to push these kids into further hopelessness. There is little these kids can personally do to change their environment, and these trips---along with TV---serve more as a form of taunting than as a means to anything.
The only contact most of these kids have with anyone of affluence, outside of shallow interchanges with store clerks, govt bureaucrats, etc. are their teachers, and this is often a disaster. These students, for the most part, get the worst teachers, those who cannot gain employment in more affluent schools. The teachers quickly grow to resent the indifference, the bad attitudes towards others, the lack of respect, the lack of empathy with others, the selfishness, the disdain for rules, etc. The feeling of hopelessness abounding in the kids soon is matched by the feelings of hopelessness by the teachers. Nobody, not the teachers or the students, see any light at the end of the tunnel. I once wrote to the Head of the English and Science Departments at 8 different inner city schools to get some student referrals for modest monetary grants to pursue approved game plans for their lives. There was not a single student referred. Not a single teacher in these two areas could be bothered to recommend anyone. I sensed the attitude was that if they could not turn these kids around, some 'idiot' distant to the scene most certainly could not. I then approached the managers of popular fast food chains, managers who come in contact with some of these students as employees. Not a single one of them cared to recommend anyone either. These young people are really and truly isolated. To me, it is shocking.
I can't give percentages, but these young people generally fall into two categories. Most are severely if not permanently damaged by their environment. You don't want to find yourself in contact with them. They are the ones who think only of survival from moment to moment. No one else counts. They feel they never count, and so, to them, no one else does either---except maybe a parent or other gang members. They have little comprehension of justice or empathy for anyone---they are filled with anger and payback. Life has not been kind to them and they are incapable of kindness to others. No one is going to hire them for legitimate jobs because they have few of the values you want in an employee. The second group, a much smaller group, have not only endured their environment, but have personal traits impossible not to admire. Usually a single parent or a grandmother, or guardian of some sort has instilled the kind of personal values in them which truly exceed those of most affluent young people. They are real heroes in the true sense of the word.
Affirmative action, defined properly, is an application of the Golden Rule. Affirmative action should mean that those, who for no reason of their own doing, are less fortunate----that these less fortunate are helped by the more fortunate to have a more level field on which to compete. Affirmative action has nothing to do with race or politics or sectarian religion. Who, more than the less fortunate young people, need better teachers, better health care, better job opportunities, better adult models, etc. We regulate and monitor all sorts of human behavior except reproduction and the raising of children. We don't let young people drive a car unless they demonstrate they know how to drive. We don't want irresponsible drivers on the road. Yet there is no such legal thing as irresponsible reproduction. Some, with questionable ethical dogmas, insist any kind of irresponsible pregnancy, once begun, must be brought to term and THEN the responsibility of our society ends. If indeed, ghetto life results in some young adults being past rehabilitation, then allowing such formative environments to exist amount to some form of murder. If this is not wrong, not much is wrong. To insist God wills this is to make God some kind of sadistic pervert. What is more clear is that if we ourselves do not take measures to ensure responsible reproduction, this cruelty to children will continue. To twist this obvious scenario into some kind of God mandated insistence that this continue is, to me, absurd.
Young products of a ghetto, even the most hardened ones---those who have essentially lost empathy, respect for, or sense of justice for others, are often not totally dead to these emotions. You spot them quickly in any class situation, and their attitude/behavior is not the sort which kindles any kind attitude toward them. Teachers and most other students will avoid them. Most everyone fears them. They go through life instilling fear in others. This makes them feel empowered. Of course not in any productive way, but still gives them transient satisfaction. My technique was to immediately call them on some infraction of my many rules and tell them after class to stop by my office before the next class. You can tell by their look they are eager for the confrontation. When they arrive, ready to let me understand the limits of my power to control them, I take the opposite tact. I pretend I have no idea why they are there and ask, "What can I do for you". "You told me to come by your office". "Well, I have a lot of students and know few of them at this point. Since you are here tell me a bit about yourself". "There is nothing you need to know about me". "I suppose not but I assume you want to better your life, and that is what I am paid to help you do, so how can I help if I know nothing about you. Where did you go to high school?" And thus, invariably they begin to talk about themselves a bit. The object is to have empathy with the difficulties of their life. It is rare that a young person doesn't want to talk about themselves. And in these cases I got the impression no one ever really cares to listen to them. All this has a difficult downside. If one listens, they go on for some time AND they will come back, OFTEN.
I forget the names of almost all of these 'pictures from life's other side'. But in the still of the night or out in the peacefulness of nature the lives of these people who live lives of desperation loom large in my mind. "Freedom and justice for all" is, after all, not to be found in the laws of evolution. Evolution is more about chance, luck, and change. The trend of evolution is ever toward the more complex, and in the case of humans the direction is for stronger, faster humans with an increase in social justice over time. We no longer, for the most part, dismember people for punishment, stone them, use slaves, deny people rights on the basis of ethnicity, or religion, or sex and now sexual orientation. But all this progress has come at a steep cost. Behind in history, and present in our own history are the large masses of people who lived, or are living, lives of cruel desperation. LIFE, FOR EACH OF US, IS REALLY A QUEST FOR MEANING. The more we understand the life we live the more contentment we achieve. Power, wealth, blind faith based inherited religion, or pleasure without meaning is vapid, hollow, shallow, and unfulfilling. A person cannot find meaning via amusement, rituals, faith based beliefs, and manipulation of others. No one, who has ever spent any time around those with power, titles, wealth, social popularity, physical beauty, or mental acuity has ever found these qualities, of themselves, to bring any real contentment. Whatever else we seek in life, it is only an increased understanding which gives meaning to our lives and this meaning brings contentment. The extent to which any individual can reach understandings about life will vary, and vary considerably, but it matters little, for only those who achieve the highest understanding, given their potential to understand, will ever reach contentment. Contentment is an inner quality. Others cannot achieve it for you. The road to understanding aspects of life differs from one person to the next. What is meditation, yoga, walks in nature, Buddhism, and other such mind searching exercises but the attempt to understand, and through understanding to achieve contentment. I don't think inherited religious dogmas qualify because they are not dogmas arrived at through reason or experience, or thoughtful thinking. Inherited religion is a crutch, a purely faith based exercise. It gives the believer an attitude, hope, but no real understanding. Those with effective religious beliefs achieved them with an open mind using observation, reason, and experience to arrive at ethical conclusions.
So what then, given the current evolutionary status, do humans know about bringing freedom and justice to these masses of people living lives of tragic desperation? We know that full development of human potential starts at an early age when the mind and body are in the earliest formative stages. Thus, ethics dictates that EVERY child deserves GOOD HEALTH; every child deserves GOOD TEACHERS; every child deserves GOOD ADULT ROLE MODELS---whether they are biological or not; that every child deserves a SAFE ENVIRONMENT; that every child needs to see the GOLDEN RULE IN ACTION around him; that every child needs to learn to APPRECIATE DIVERSITY---amongst humans and the entire plant and animal kingdom; that every child needs to learn the RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT; that every child needs to learn about RESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTION. All of these needs are within the ability of human possibility. No doubt with time, God's created evolutionary process will achieve these advancements. How long and what kind of massive evolutionary corrections will be required by Mother Nature is beyond human understanding. God's evolutionary process is a brilliant, effective, and good process. History has evidenced that. But the individual tragedies which occur along the way are staggering and sad. For all living individuals, the Hand of Fate keeps spinning, where it stops and for whom it will favor seems driven by chance and luck. Does God ever interfere on behalf of specific individuals of any species? How can one really know? Maybe he does a lot, maybe he does seldom, maybe he never does. I always come back to one of my favorite quotations, tampered with in a minor fashion: "There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it's natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it's got to be cherished and if we think like that and live like that and live that kind of life, we can all maximize our freedom and the freedom of others, we can all maximize our contentment and the contentment of others, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation." (Davis) (Maybe Wade Davis?)
