In the late summer of 1967, my best friend and I were driving from Michigan to New York City. In the early evening hours, as we passed west of Detroit, we saw a strange, actually unprecedented, sight. The sun was setting in the East. After driving all night and approaching New York on the New Jersey Turnpike, it happened again. This time the sun was rising in the West.
What we were witnessing may have been biblical, but it was not celestial. What was occurring was the beginning of a rapid decline for two major American cities, Detroit and Newark. Amid a spasm of rioting, violence, death, arson and destruction, the sky was being lit up, not by the sun, but by the aura of the two cities in flames. Neither has ever recovered.
With the horrible events in Newtown, Conn., violence in our society, especially gun violence, is front-and-center once again. It is possible, but hardly certain, that this slaughter of the innocents will be a turning point, a last straw.
With respect to guns, especially these high-powered ones, time is on the side of the NRA and its more extreme elements. There is outrage now, but outrage is pretty light work and tends to have a short shelf life. If history is our guide, once things “settle down,” enough primary-fearing, cowardly members of Congress will work to make sure that nothing substantive emerges.
And, unlike Newtown, we have in our country many neighborhoods where high levels of violence, especially gun violence, are now the norm. Gun deaths are barely noticed or noted. At the same time, while horrific events like that in Newtown become increasingly frequent and more deadly, overall levels of violence have declined measurably in recent decades in the United States. For example, in New York City, homicide rates are at historic lows.
How is this possible? These realities seem to contradict one another. They don’t. In a society increasingly divided into “prime” and “sub-prime,” much of the violence is now confined to neighborhoods and groups that are sub-prime and have effectively been written off.
High levels of violence are normal in many poor, isolated, minority communities. These neighborhoods are plagued by gang-related, as well as unorganized,random violence. And, where levels have declined, it is from the unprecedented heights reached during the years of the crack epidemic.
Years ago, especially among liberals, there was an almost universally accepted belief that poverty leads to violence. It never rang true, since we have had many poor communities with low levels of violence. Rather than absolute poverty, what was more important in these communities was the disappearance of work, and, with work, the fading of hope.
What has turned out to be quite true is the flip side of the equation: violence clearly leads to poverty and the danger of an irreversible downward spiral.
Detroit is probably exhibit number one of this spiral. When my friend and I drove past the burning city in 1967, it had a population of more than 1.6 million people. Today, that population is down to 700,000, a decline of historic proportions. Not all of what has happened can be attributed to violence, but it has certainly played a major role, and the spasm of violence in 1967 was a true turning point.
There is a man who picks up dead bodies for the City of Detroit. Because the city is broke, he is an “independent contractor,” getting paid on a “per body” basis. Despite the decline in population, he says business is pretty good. He summed up his work in a politically incorrect manner by saying, “The blacks kill each other, the whites commit suicide and the Chinese never die.” Violence and despair normalized.
The violence in Newtown horrified us because it took the lives of innocents and because it happened in a place that should be safe from violence. And, despite the long odds, in some sense, we all know that it could have been our children, teachers or principal. This kind of mass violence is still in the process of becoming normal in our society. And because the killer was the American version of a suicide bomber, it is not that easy to focus anger since he is also dead.
In the course of a year, more than twice as many Virgin Islanders will die violently, most from guns, than died in Newtown. What is different is that those killed in the Virgin Islands, although they are mostly young, are not the innocents, even though some of them were first-graders less than 10 years ago. They will die one at a time, in most cases, rather than as victims of a mass murderer. And they will die because, as the man in Detroit said, they are “killing each other.”
Like many other bad things, people have gotten used to it.These are now dog bites man stories. It is sad to think of the number of times that Tolstoy’s famous quote from Anna Karenina applies to our lives today: “There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.” These killings are one of those “conditions.” So it doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
But it is a big deal. It has become fairly easy to write this group of young people off, and their outrageous, threatening and often-criminal behavior makes it even easier. But, just as the children in Newtown were part of a community, so these young people, whatever they are doing or have done, are also a part of the community. And, while they may not be innocent, they are young, immature and do stupid, destructive things, something many adults seem to have forgotten from their own adolescence.
It is interesting to note that whenever these terrible crimes occur, the issue of mental health and mental health care come to the surface. It is right that this should happen, at least if it would lead to some action, rather than simply providing cover for inaction on the issue of guns.
Equally interesting is that what is typically referred to as “inner city” or “urban” violence, that is nonwhite violence, rarely leads to a discussion of mental or behavioral health. And yet, everyone with experience in impoverished communities knows that these issues are endemic and rarely diagnosed or treated in the same way that they are in “mainstream” society. Our jails and prisons are full of young people with undiagnosed or misdiagnosed mental illnesses.
Our response to this group and its violence has been mass incarceration, increased personal security and gated communities. Each of these responses is understandable, but they all fail a fundamental moral test. They make it easy to consign an ever-increasing group to the basket labeled “others.”
Suppressing violence is important, but it is not the same as achieving community peace. That will require locating sources of hope and promise. The first step in understanding how to get there is a big dose of humility,to acknowledge how little we know, the mistakes that we have made, and then, to make a best effort to figure out what kind of communities we want to live in. Those are the prerequisites to finding some pathways to reaching those who often seem unreachable.
What seems very clear is that the real answers, and there will be many rather than one, are not going to emerge from some federal program or new laws, as useful as those might be. Instead they will be the result of dedicated people working to achieve community peace at the neighborhood level. Community by community.