Ghetto Revelations: The passing of the buck

I live in historic Baltimore, Maryland where the history is rich and nature is just few short steps away, but Monday evening shook me back to reality and it made me think a thought that I had deposited in the deepest recesses of my mind. I hate the city and many of the people that populate it. Usually I keep my thoughts occupied so I never get the opportunity to delve into the crux of this feeling.

On Monday evening some neighborhood kids saw fit to shoot a BB gun through the second floor of my son's bedroom window while he was preparing for school the next day. I was startled to hear my wife and son calling for me as I was settling down to absorb the politics of the day, I could hear the urgency in their voice so I when I ran up the stairs and they regaled me with what happened something in me just snapped and I literally had an out of body experience. The next thing I remember was my body heaving with rage going to the basement, putting my shoes to go outside on my game plan was to retrieve my baseball bat out of the car and casually walk over to the corner where the neighborhood kids congregate and start swinging swiftly at every "guilty" young person in sight. The evil look on my face apparently unnerved my wife and she persuaded me to call the police, which I did and they came out after only the second call when I informed them that they could come out now or they could come out after they get the call about a berserk man wielding a baseball bat which would result in twice the paperwork.

When the officer came out he was very professional and he advised me that he had received a call from elsewhere in the neighborhood about some kids doing target practice, but given the fact that many of the parents are absentee or just don't care it turns out to be a vicious cycle. We spoke for awhile and he told me of some of the encounters that he has on the regular and it really started me to thinking about a great many things. Something that my Grandma told me long ago (God rest her soul) "It starts at home and spreads abroad." Instead of my looking at these kids of the corner with a disdainful loathing eye maybe I should focus on their parents, but what will that accomplish? If I pack up the family and move to the suburbs the problem will still exist, but it will just be out of sight out of mind. The next day I descended into the park across from my home and combed my brain for answers.

It is apparent that parents or effective parenting is in short supply in Baltimore and that is attributable to the fact that we are still in the grasp of the Crack-baby generation (the children are parenting themselves) in driving through Baltimore to my office downtown I see all shapes and sizes from the homeless, drug addicts, young people that should be in a classroom, large groups of young people blasting music, condemned buildings which serve as monument of the industry that used to power these communities.

The one trend that I noticed and it seems to be rather simplistic, but it is the medium of music, everywhere I go it is music playing, and the music of choice is rap. The "uniform" of the street is often what I see in the rap videos which typically consists of but not limited to bandana, pants hanging down past the crack of the butt with the underwear exposed, sometimes I see them adorned with jewelry and even more telling they are rapping more often than not without the assistance of music. Eureka! I thought... It is the music poisoning the youth; this is what they take their cue from in the vacuum of effective parenting these rappers "scribes" speak to their situation but they are no better off that they are, essentially it is the blind leading the blind.

In looking at the "uniform" a little analysis of the wardrobe is sorely needed. Now the saggy pants look is taken from prison culture, the prisoners are not given belts as they could potentially be used as weapons against others or themselves hence the sagging. Baggy pants have been the trend since my time in high school in the latter half of the 1980's and early 1990's, but showing the underwear was a no-no in my time. Now in prison showing the underwear or the cleavage of your butt crack is a sign to the other inmates that this is an available piece of tail (for sex). Hello! I'm quite sure that if half of the people that shower the world with the glare of their underwear knew this interesting tidbit of information they would probably stuck in their shirts faster than George W. Bush stumbles over a word.

Hip-Hop and Rap are two terms that are used interchangeably, but they are as different as oil is from vinegar. Hip-Hop is a culture and a lifestyle that is empowering and life giving. Hip-Hop music speaks to the spirit and talks of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and the tactics that have and can be used, wordplay is paramount and the responsibility to their listeners is not something that is taken lightly. In Hip-Hop there is ALWAYS a message.

Rap music essentially is a "catchy" hook set to music and repeated over two or three choruses, usually there is a plug for the so type of product or service that will serve as a detriment to the inner city community that the "artist" (a term that I use lightly) hails from. More often than not it is about drugs, glorification of things that serve to disempower rather than empower; cars with blinged out rims when low ownership in the inner city is at a all time low, gold teeth when you don't have medical coverage, high end clothing when the focus should be on the lack of educational access and resources. More importantly the "rap artist" is usually a creation of the music executives.

All the while, record executives get away without accepting responsibility to the chaos that they are a party to. Am I to believe that everything that all the artists featured on Billboard are representative of the inner-city community as a whole? Poison is being foisted on the community as a whole. Now is the time to collectively say enough! Is it too much to demand quality or to force feed quality onto the airwaves? It is a sad day where R. Kelly (why isn't he in jail yet?) can get top billing when other progressive artists get the relative shaft. When failure comes to pass it is usually systemic, the parents have failed to guide their children, and politicians have failed to allocate the resources that communities need due to their misguided and selfish priorities (Iraq War/campaign contributors). And business community has failed in that they put profit over principle, but then again the old adage says "Its business never personal". More importantly I have failed as well because admittedly I see many of the urban dwellers as unredeemable which is direct opposition to my faith. So sad revelation indeed.