Baltimore needs to find its ‘Cape Town Fringe’
I was 10 the first time I heard ‘Cape Town Fringe’. It was then that I realized there was a beautiful world outside the one I lived. Amid the trash and transit strikes and the violence of 1976, I knew there was some place called Cape Town, where Dollar Brand played sweet piano. I knew in Cape Town, there was a sound so elementally hopeful, colorful and fluid, unlike anything I’d heard or felt before.
The Presidential Election means the coming of the silly season. It seems to me that we Democrats, Liberals especially, cannot not see the wood for the trees. We worry about whether Obama will lose, not win in November. We spend our energy calling tea partiers racist and the GOP sexist. Well, to a great degree, they are. So what? We have work to do.
MolMol stopped by the other day. Though I hadn’t seen him in many, many months, I could tell he had grown up in his 18th year. A large afro and several tattoos for the friends he had already lost gave him the appearance of a man much older. Still, he had what was obvious to me the day I met him many years ago. He still had his bounce.
He sat on my stoop while I tended to the small patch of dirt I seem unable to grow grass on. I’d forgotten Dollar Brand was playing in the background. Silent and serious through the whole fourteen minute tune, when it was over, he asked who it was, saying emphatically, ‘that was cool.’ I smiled, giving him a ‘now you know what I know’ look which he returned. The thing about MolMol, Jamal is his name, is that his life story is not riddled with hope.
He comes from addiction. Both parents. He’s had social services in his life since he was a boy. Still unable to read much, he walked out of school when he was twelve and has been shuttled from program to program in attempts to keep him in the school setting. Even so, this is no dummy. As we all know, he is like many who haven’t the home life to sustain him through the years when maturity is supposed to be matched in educational and social standards. That hasn’t happened. His formative years have not laid the groundwork for his survival.
MolMol’s experience at home and on the streets of the east side is not where goals were set or standards met. What he was taught in school was not backed up at home. He learned more about drug use at home than I ever did from the cokeheads I knew in the 1980’s.
He isn’t Ellis Coleman, a 20-year-old from tough Chicago circumstance, who is on his way to London this summer to compete as a wrestler. Young Coleman, who has become a sensation with his ‘flying squirrel’ maneuver, has a mother who is salt of the earth and a coach whom the young man is devoted to. Mol doesn’t have either of these relationships. He is just learning to trust adults as he has become one. He has parents who functioned just enough for social services to allow them to keep the child but not enough for the child to succeed.
At this point, you may want to tell me to stop picking on the victims family. You want to say it’s an unfair world where jobs are being sent overseas and the rich are taking in all the earnings. You can blame racism or addiction too. All I can say in response is this: you may be right. Still, the time you take to pick a fight with me is the time it takes for another Jamal to fall through the cracks. And where do they end up? In the hands of police, corrections, funeral directors or all three.
In Baltimore City and County, almost 80 percent of long term cases in DSS (Department of Social Services), have addiction involved. Whether it be one or both of the parents or grandparents as care givers, these are cases that put enormous strain on the system and do not provide goals and standards anywhere near to what we might expect of ourselves or those families. This indicative rate of addiction also leaves little time for the 20% of cases where the issue is simply mental health or just plain poverty.
I will repeat myself by saying I am not a moralist when it comes to drug use. Folks who want to use may do so. Still, when a person involves a child in their addiction, we have a problem. And this Liberal is no wimp. I may empathize and always seek to understand any family or condition, with or without addiction. But, no matter what your circumstance, I will never condone any such selfish behavior that sends a kid to a horrible future.
It seems we have gone from the bygone era of blaming the poor for being poor during the advent of “Social Darwinism” to the present, where we absolve such families of responsibility. Yet most every social worker in these two jurisdictions will tell you that we need a middle ground between the two extremes. And, we need policy that is derived by those who have clinical experience and not by those who shelter themselves in academia for the single purpose of writing policy.
In the last hundred years, Liberalism and the Democratic Party have fought to make the once heroic the norm. We have championed the rights of inclusion for all Americans against an America that was too close minded or fearful. We have fought for desegregation, for women, for unions, for peace and war. Even so, when the GOP wants to defund so much of the social safety net, we ignore the best tool we have in keeping a kid out of jail. We ignore the family as we have forgotten the hard work it takes to make the rights of the poor matter as much as the rights of the rich do.
People say the Baltimore Police are an occupying force in neighborhoods like the one MolMol comes from. I largely agree with the appraisal yet I don’t blame police. They are there because the political leadership in Baltimore has not come to understand how to make better families out of ones that function badly.
Instead of tackling the issues here as they exist, now that its black cops killing black kids, we defer blame and call such an occupying police force institutional racism. Bull. We don’t realize the horrid, unwinnable situation that exists where grown women and men in uniform face off against children with weapons who have nothing to lose but are too damned immature to know it. We’ve got work to do.
We ignore the rights of the child, born into this world by parents, who may be teens as well, and who have little forethought of what it takes to not make a child a failure. We are often dealing with parents who differentiate right and wrong based on whether or not you get caught. In trying to do right by the poor, we have wrongly externalized the responsibility of parents to their children.
MolMol came by looking for work and we’ll make sure he finds it. Unlike many of his friends, he is ahead of them because he knows he wants to make it. He is individuating and it is a joy to watch. While he may be years behind so many of other 18 year olds, his want is the best first step. Hopefully, his friends will see that same bounce to his step and follow suit. If that happens, less of them will be dealt to the hands of police. And maybe soon we can say Baltimore, like Mannenberg, is where it’s happening.
Robert Emmet Mara has been in Baltimore since 2006. A native New Yorker, Robert came to Baltimore to do three things: work with kids, renovate houses and write a second book of fiction. Since his arrival, he has managed to do all three and more.
He has sought better oversight for his still blighted Harwood neighborhood from the city and has been asked to speak to various community association leaders on the subject of city agency relations.