Part 4: Violence in America: Homegrown Terrorism
We are, at last, I guess, ready to list what specific kinds of damage can take place in children raised in modern day ghetto environments—environments which are much different today than in past ghettoes. The cost and effectiveness of preventing these damages is less when we level the playing fields more for these children during their formative years, than trying to undo the damage incurred after they have become adults. It is important to interpret the list below in the right vein. How much damage to a child, to what system of the body, consequent to chronic stress in childhood, depends on the frequency of the stress, the severity of the stress, and the genetic make-up of the child. Basically our body stress responses happen by increasing or decreasing the activity of other functions of the body. The formative years are crucial periods for growth and maturation of many aspects of mental and body functions. Here is the list, not really designed to be all-inclusive but most relevant to the topic at hand.
Immune system depression:
more common colds
more herpes virus re-activations
increased chance of auto-immune diseases such as MS, hyperthyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis,etc.
more susceptibility to many diseases or medical conditions
Inhibition of growth
Less blood to the digestive tract—less absorption of nutrients
Metabolic derangements——diabetes more likely
Learning and memory affected
Increased glucocorticoid blood levels in adults (glucocorticoid increases are a major component of the body stress response). It is not good to have constant increased levels of glucocorticoids in the blood.
Altered reactions to pain—Pain is an interesting and intriguing topic. For a start we have physical pain and also mental pain. Neither one is very pleasant. Sensing pain is good in that it tells us something is wrong and we better find a way to correct the problem. There have been rare instances when someone is born with no functioning pain receptors. They could be standing with one leg in the camp fire and continue to tell a funny story. To say the least, their life is difficult. Yes, pain is good but not when it is chronic or when there is nothing we can do about it. It is important here to understand that our mindset can influence, not whether we feel pain, but how we feel about the pain. Acute massive pain, like that maybe received in an auto accident or battlefield, may be reduced by a feed-back mechanism in the CNS. This feedback mechanism involves beta endorphin, a chemical which is an endogenous opiate produced by our bodies, and works on the same receptors as morphine/ heroine.It has long been known that a soldier, hurt in his leg, knowing that this will not be fatal and yet get him away from the front line, often is little disturbed by the pain. Some pain we learn to enjoy like hot spicy food, or some people with certain sexual acts. For this musing, we will let these situations lie.
While pain serves an important function, it isn’t very helpful if we suffer chronic stress. In this musing we are focusing on the kind of chronic stress experienced by children raised in our modern day ghettoes. Most of us raised in more affluent neighborhoods realize how much stress we felt growing up. No matter how we cut it, every child faces a strange world within which they struggle to survive and achieve some contentment. We cannot accurately indicate by what factor stresses on a child, raised in a modern ghetto environment, are increased. Maybe it is five or ten fold, but whatever it is, the factor is huge. Well adjusted adults have enough time adjusting to the stresses met in life—for children this adjustment is really difficult. The manner in which every system in the body is going to function for the rest of a child’s life is being developed during their formative years. Stress impacts every system in the body. Some of the impacts are more permanent than others.
Here is what we now know. High level, sustained stimulation of pain pathways in humans of any age, but especially children, makes them more sensitive and more responsive to pain, physical or mental. Thus, pain begets pain leading to hyperalgesia. Well, this not good news for these kids being raised in a modern day ghetto environment. Why does this occur? It occurs because the hormone beta endorphin becomes depleted and the child ‘feels’ the pain more acutely over time. While this information is all new, it may well be that children suffering from beta endorphin depletion need infusion of some morphine on a carefully controlled basis. Time will tell us the answer to this.
The length of this musing is pushing me to generalize or leave out some of the effects of chronic stress on the body. Let’s just point out, based on what is mentioned above about the effects of chronic stress, that children raised in our modern ghettoes will often reach adulthood with many physical, mental, and social handicaps than children raised in better environments. If our society has not attacked the problems inherent in their environment, but then try to solve it after children reach adulthood, this is probably an unrealistic goal, at least for most of those with such damaged results. Affirmative action was an attempt to give such children some slack coming out of the ghetto and trying to succeed with a career, but the attempt was dead on arrival when it became a program targeting particular races. The end result was that, for the most part, middle class blacks, hispanics—whatever, were the ones to reap the benefits——not the blacks and hispanics in our ghettoes. Affirmative action has faded away since naturally it caused some backlash which was has set back race relations in some sectors of our society. Of course it did, if our son or daughter goes to school with a minority race student, who lives in our neighborhood, goes to the same school, and perhaps are friends, with the same academic grades in school—why the hell is one accepted at Harvard and the other one not? Even more significant, this kind of nonsense does nothing to help those kids in ghetto environments.
Having spent years teaching in a University where many of the students did come from these ghetto communities, some insight into this population was imbedded in my mind. The vast majority of ghetto kids will never even attempt to go to any college. They get to be 18 years of age where the unemployment rate is 60-70 % in their neighborhood, they are products of the worst schools, the weakest teachers, the least equipped schools, the most dangerous neighborhoods, have poor health care, and in many case therefore have poor health, their learning abilities and memory mechanisms have been stunted as a result of the chronic stresses they exist under, their social skills are lacking, and fear/anger/frustration are often the overriding emotions.
As we focus on the consequences of children born into these ‘ghettoes’, we must remember that all of us, collectively, through our elected officials, have precisely ensured that these ghettoes exist, and we have done little to prevent their spread and continued lousy environment. We have, to be fair here, given more groups rights and protections, and marginally better health care for some of them. Still, these kinds of ghettoes are the fastest growing environments in our society. Not good.
The last part of the brain to fully develop is the frontal lobe. This is sort of the executive center of our brains. This is where we make judgments and plans and learn to inhibit compulsive and inappropriate behavior. When we drink alcohol, for example, the alcohol inhibits the frontal cortex and thus the frontal lobe is less inhibitory on our behavior. Thus, this part of the brain is most affected by the formative environment for the longest period of time. Simply put, a child who grows up in a dangerous and fearful environment is far more often to not even comprehend ‘normal’ behavior’ or ‘normal attitude’ or even have their frontal lobe as well developed as those in a more affluent neighborhood. Everything on this topic in this musing gets tricky. The formative environment for children these days includes, in large part, the kind of info coming into their brain from electronic gadgets. This, at least in theory, opens the door for all children, to create a formative environment which will impact on the development of their frontal lobes. Nevertheless, a child in a ghetto gets the violence and anger and frustrations from their actual environment as well as from electronic gadgets. We will come back to this later.
Chronic stress, via glucocorticoids secreted during stress, causes some atrophy in the brain, especially the hippocampus, since this part of the brain has a high concentration of glucocorticoid receptors. Since the hippocampus is very much involved in memory storage and retrieval, memory can be affected. If the chronic stress ends, the neurons atrophied may grow back to varying degrees. When we comment that some young adult from a ghetto doesn’t exhibit the best social behavior, that may well be true, and how much restoration of the damaged areas can occur is speculative. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults is also associated with damage to the hippocampus. Part 5 to follow
