As I read about the armed robbery of a fast food spot in Portsmouth last night, a crime that resulted in a female employee being shot, I wanted to make a relevant comment. You know, something insightful about the relationship between prolonged economic depression, the perennial lack of opportunity perceived by so many in the hood, and the psychological reality experienced by street youth in general - and how all of this ties into occurrences of violence and crime. Instead, I find myself thinking of my youth in New York City, and especially of my mother, a Black woman herself widowed by street crime, who slogged through all kinds of weather and personal ailments to make it to the post office job she held my entire life. The streets were still reeling from the nuclear-level impact of crack cocaine and the fast money it injected into the hood. rapid militarization of the police force and attendant targeting of black and brown boys. Her desire to get my grandparents out of the daily pressures of that life is what eventually led her to move them to Virginia Beach during the 1990s. I think about how street crime is an ever-present reality in poor neighborhoods, like a damned Uroboros, the snake eating itself which symbolizes eternity, in this case symbolic of a community devouring itself. The perpetrators and victims of street crime are usually from the same community, creating a sort of predatory microcosm in which certain citizens are forced to form the buffer between street-level criminality and the rest of the society. These are the same neighborhoods populated with check cashing spots, payday loan storefronts, greasy-spoon Chinese food joints and neighborhood stores that exist mostly to sell blunts, beer and lottery tickets. Rarely is there a real supermarket in walking distance, and eating anything other than garbage requires a deliberate effort. It is not easy being poor in America. It is not easy being a single mother. It is not fun being Black, and it is no joy to live in a concrete jungle filled with all manner of hungry creatures. Put all this together and then add atop it a bureaucratic system seemingly designed to extort money from the poorest among us by any means possible. Add a vicious political current that attacks the poor for the crime of poverty and seeks to gut the social safety net whose tenuous strands keep so many from falling completely through the growing cracks in our social foundation. Do the math when you add a society that sees the victims and criminals as part and parcel of the same problem, and treats the entire community accordingly (stop and frisk, driving while black, sentencing disparities, et al and ad infinitum), and a popular culture so bleached of soul that it becomes a delivery vehicle for nihilism and self-degradation. Then I think about the other side of criminality - the fat cat hedge fund managers, the bank execs with their multi-million dollar golden parachutes, the predator capitalists who would sell gasoline undies to their auntie in Hell if it would help their margins, the corrupt and for-sale professional politicians who exist to serve the oligarchs and assists in sucking the lifeblood from the poor. I think of all these things, and then remember that today is election day, albeit an off-year contest, which ostensibly idealizes the bloodless change of power in this country...and I wonder...how would we be different, as a nation, if there was no buffer...if more people were forced to live the life of a second-class citizen, if the illusion was more fully ripped away. As above, so below. When I see the agenda being pushed by political elites in this country, the future being engineered, the dog-tiredness of the lower classes and gadget-induced apathy of the diminishing middle. The vastness of our capacity for violence as a nation, a military, a police force, and individuals. And I cannot help but think... Soon we will find out.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 17:52:15 +0000
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