Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF Page B

that a kid can get himself a box cutter and wait outside until the last bell rings. With a metal detector, you can keep the homicide out of the hallways. Perhaps with something more, you can keep the homicide out of the heart.
    “These boys die like it’s nothing,” said Angela Burton, whose boyfriend was one of the two killed in East New York.
    The problem is that when we look into this abyss, it goes so deep that we get dizzy and pull back from the edge. Teenage mothers. Child abuse. Crowded schools. Homes without fathers. Projects lousy with drugs, vermin, crime. And, always, the smell of urine in the elevator. I have never been in a project that hasn’t had that odor, and I have never smelled it without wondering, If your home smells like a bathroom, what does that tell you about yourself?
    One of the ways to motivate kids is to say that if you do this bad thing now, you won’t be able to do this good thing tomorrow. That doesn’t work with the Lost Boys. They stopped believing in tomorrow a long time ago. The impulse control of an adolescent, the conviction that sooner or later you’ll end up dead or in jail anyhow, and a handgun you can buy on the corner easier than getting yourself a pair of new Nikes: the end result is preordained.
    “If you don’t got a gun, you got to get one,” said one teenager hanging with his friends at the corner of East New York and Pennsylvania Avenues.
    If news is sometimes defined as aberration, as Man Bites Dog, it’s the successes we should be rushing out to cover in these neighborhoods, the kids who graduate, who get jobs, who stay clean. Dr. Alwyn Cohall, a pediatrician who runs four school-based clinics in New York, remembers the day he was giving one of those kids a college physical, which is the happiest thing he ever does, when from outside he heard the sound. Pow. Pow. One moment he was filling out the forms for a future, the next giving CPR to another teenager with a gunshot wound blossoming in his chest. The kid died on the cement.
    “He never even made the papers next day,” the doctor recalled.
    The story in East New York will likely end with the funerals. A fifteen-year-old killer is not that unusual; many city emergency rooms provide coloring books on gun safety. Dr. Cohall says that when the students at his schools come back after the long hot summer, they are routinely asked by the clinic staff how many of their friends were shot over vacation. The good doctor knows that it is possible to reclaim some of the Lost Boys, but it requires money, dedication, and, above all, the will to do it. Or we can continue to let them go. To defray expenses.

ACROSS THE DIVIDE
May 3, 1992
    They say that one way the defense attorneys won the case was by playing that videotape over and over, freezing the frames so that after a while it was no more than a random collection of points of light, highlighting the movements of the suspect instead of the batons of the police.
    But no matter how many times I watch the four police officers beat up Rodney King, it still looks indefensible to me, and to the eight-year-old, too. Three times he watched the videotape and three times he brought his arms over his head in a double arch, as though to ward off baton blows. And finally he said, “Are they really allowed to do that?” It broke my heart, but it could have been worse. I pictured a mother and an eight-year-old watching the same clip, both of them black, the son asking the same question the mother forced to reply, “Yes, baby, they are.” The lawyers told the jurors that they had to pay attention to what happened before the videotape started rolling. Here’s what came before: Ronald Reagan, Willie Horton, rotten schools, no jobs,falling plaster, broken boilers, David Duke. Years and years of rage and racism, measured now in angry words and broken glass.
    Everyone wants to attack the jurors. Let’s be honest, white folks: They walked into that room with the baggage most of us carry,