Holiday Potpourri
By Mansfield Frazier
While we won’t yet, as Lincoln said, be guided “by the better angels of our nature” this Holiday Season, winds of change are blowing across the country with a ferocity not seen in America since the 1960s… and it’s about damn time. The “Occupy” movements around the land — even in Alaska where the temperature is minus 40 degrees — are beginning to dig in for a long, cold winter of discontent and I’m wagering they’ll still be around come spring.
This is their Valley Forge, their Wounded Knee, their Stonewall Inn… young people in this country are “mad as hell — and aren’t going to take it anymore.” Heroes are in the making… myths being created… legends forever etched into the fabric of American history.
These mostly young citizen/protesters have demonstrated amazing resiliency in the face of those right-wing pundits who daily attempt to marginalize and still their voices (unsuccessfully, I might add)… and their success will ultimately lead to a better America, and indeed, a better world. After bringing the Robber Barons of Wall Street to heel, who knows what other social inequalities this movement might take on and change?
In spite of the fact Occupiers were evicted from their encampments (in a coordinated effort by police departments around the country) the young people regrouped and virtually laughed in the faces of those in authority… and now it’s well nigh impossible to get the Genie back into the bottle. The more police repress (as they did by needlessly pepper spraying students at the University of California at Davis as they sat with their arms locked together on the campus quad), the more additional citizens will step up with alacrity to join the demonstrations. As Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”
The Healthy Cleveland Initiative
Attempting to use economic impact as the driver to bring about improved societal outcomes, The Healthy Cleveland Initiative was rolled out at the Boys & Girls Club on Broadway last week. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the public health and economic impact of youth violence in Cleveland.
It’s been estimated that each time a young person is killed, the cost to the community — for the wide variety of services needed to heal the wound — is in excess of $1 million. And calculating the damage done to the region at-large, in terms of deprecation of reputation (which hurts when attempting to attract new businesses) is virtually impossible.
Marilyn Rice of the World Health Organization, the keynote speaker, did an excellent job of providing an overview of how violence affects communities, but it was 20-year-old Isaac Knowles, a resident of Hough and one of the panelists, who first gave voice to one of the potential solutions to urban violence: Jobs.
When Deputy Police Chief Calvin Williams rhetorically asked why young people attack each other, Knowles knew the answer: the victim had something the perpetrator wanted. It was for that reason Knowles admitted that for a period of time he carried a gun back and forth to school to prevent being jumped — again.
Please bear with me while I go back down this road again… but this is critically important: By far the best way to put an end to most urban violence is to institute programs like Purpose Built Communities in Atlanta, or the Harlem Children Zone (HCZ) in NYC, where the child is raised from birth to be a successful, law-abiding citizen. Jeffrey Canada, the director of HCZ wryly notes that we blanch at spending $3,500 a year to properly raise an inner-city child, yet don’t blink an eye to locking up that same individual at a cost of $50,000 per year once they become an adult and run afoul of the law. Talk about sheer stupidity … no wonder the country is in dire financial straits.
But for those youth already in the pipeline and off to a marginal or bad start, other strategies have to be employed.
Here’s why: When boys reach puberty they become interested in the opposite sex… as demonstrated by them beginning to wash under their armpits without being told, and to start regularly changing their underwear and socks. Biologically, the need to impress young girls is great to the point of being almost overwhelming.
But it’s hard to impress girls without having any money… it’s tough being dead broke in an iPod, Xbox world. Girls are interested in boys who have some substance about themselves, who can take them out to a movie or buy them a gift for their birthday. Yet grinding poverty makes these simple pleasures out of reach for more and more Americans, black, brown, and white.
Mark my words of this: Impoverished youth of our nation will do virtually anything to get their hands on some money. If that means selling drugs, robbing, or stealing, then so be it… their very human biological urges are driving them that hard. If you don’t come from (or have been around) abject poverty… with no prospects of obtaining any money and no concept of a future… you really don’t have a frame of reference by which to judge these youths’ desperate actions.
In countries like Brazil (and cities like New York) school systems are paying middle school students for achieving good grades. When I approached former Cleveland Schools CEO Eugene Sanders about instituting at least a pilot program here to see if it would work, he turned his nose up and sniffed, “I’m philosophically opposed to paying students for getting good grades.” He then used much of the funds the state gave him to improve outcomes for 9th graders to — hire consultants. Go figure. More on this next week.
Revisiting the death penalty
The day after Reginald Brooks, a known paranoid schizophrenic, was executed by the State of Ohio for the 1982 killings of his three sons (a horrible crime to be sure), the battle to end the barbaric practice of state-sanctioned murder was once again engaged.
A story and accompanying video on The Daily, featuring my good friend and sometimes colleague, former Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Terry Collins (together we address conferences of corrections professionals and go into prisons speaking in regards to best practices in prisoner reentry), reported on Ohio House Bill 160. Known as the Execution of Justice Bill, it seeks to put an end to the utilization of the death penalty in Ohio. The cosponsors of the bill show how over half-a-billion dollars of tax money could have been saved since the reinstitution of the practice in 1982 if we instead had sentenced people to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The video can be seen here.
The bill can be accessed here.
The question now facing Ohio lawmakers is… “are we so brutish as a people, so vindictive, so dead set on retribution, that we will continue to flush millions upon millions of tax dollars down the toilet?” Not only is the death penalty morally wrong, but we simply can’t afford to continue to use it on people… no matter their crime.
Artist/Illustrator student needed
Our non-profit organization is in need of someone to do a 24” X 36” poster rendering of our vineyard with a biocellar in the background. We can pay a small stipend… and I do mean small. But we can promise tons of recognition. If interested, send an email with work samples to: Info@NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Holiday Potpourri”
Deon Levy
You need your on TV show Mansfield. The people of this town would be better served watching plausible suggestions on how to improve their community. Even is just the public access channel, the city needs some diversity talking about some meaningful content.