People Change

People do change... just not all that much. This truism was brought home to me once again at a family reunion I attended over the weekend. I wish I could claim this family as my own, but, alas, I’m merely what’s known as a “shirt-tail” relative, one with tenuous, tangential ties to this clan of diverse Black folk.

I couldn’t help but overhear a much beloved and respected 93-year-old aunt dropping some wisdom on her recently engaged grandniece. In fact, everyone under the pavilion who was paying any attention could hear her ... which was exactly what the elder wanted. The 22-year-old, recent college graduate had been defending her selection in a future husband to her male cousins, who evidently knew the dude in question fairly well, and didn’t have a high assessment of him.

Aunt Callie, as everyone calls her, told Sherenna in no uncertain terms that if she thought that marriage was going to cause her betrothed (who once was on track to play in the NFL until he blew his knee out in his senior year) to quit hanging out all night in topless bars, blowing his paycheck like a drunk sailor, and trying to drown his sorrow over his failed dreams of professional football stardom in Grey Goose, she was sadly mistaken.

The message was simple: Embarking on a marriage thinking that she was going to change the young man was a very bad idea.

“Girl, you listen to me, and you listen real good,” Aunt Callie said to Sherenna, “people don’t change because someone wants them to change, they only change when they want to change, and that ain’t too damn often. You’d better be happy with him the way he is ‘cause what you’re seeing right now is most likely what you’re going to wind up with for life.” Black folks of a certain generation call this being “on front street.” She was being “loud talked” about this issue in front of all her family so that when (not if, when) the relationship failed, she would not be able to come back crying and saying that no one schooled her about her bad choice up front. She was being forewarned. No one knows if it will make one bit of difference in her planned nuptials, but we all heard Aunt Callie warn Sherenna about an important fact of life.

Now, I doubt that any reasonably experienced person would doubt the wisdom Aunt Callie laid on Sherenna. Most people, absent some cataclysmic event in their lives, or some incentive that is of direct benefit to them, change very little after the onset of early adulthood. True, something like getting arrested for drunken driving might make a person sober up and perhaps join AA, or the death of a loved one, serious illness or some other trauma can cause a behavioral shift, but even then change is sometimes hard to make. I think most reasonably experienced people are still in agreement with me. Then why is it that we expect ill raised and undereducated young women to change and all of a sudden become caring, nurturing mothers?

With the murder rate soaring, 13-year-old boys stealing cars and mowing down innocent citizens out for an evening at the theater, and the high school dropout rate still unacceptably high, one of the most called for solutions is for the mothers of these soon-to-be thugs to read to them, take an interest in their school work, quit hanging out at the rump-shaking nightspots and join the PTA. Why don’t we ask them to find a cure for cancer while they’re at it?

What makes us think that our haranguing them in print (here’s a newsflash: they don’t — and some of them can’t — read), blasting away at them from the pulpit (they don’t attend church) and talking about them like they have tails on radio talk shows (they only listen to Hip-Hop) is going to change their behavior(s) one whit? I completely understand —and share — the anger many people feel toward these parents who are not properly doing their job of childrearing, and then unleashing their failures to prey on society via the gun, knife and dope bag when they become teenagers. Indeed, we have a right — maybe even a duty — to be mad as hell at them; but, alas, we only succeed in taking it out on their children.

As I’ve stated many times before (and will keep stating it until the right types of mentoring programs are established) many of the parents — not all poor, not all Black, by the way) have as much chance of successfully piloting a child through life as you or I have of piloting the Space Shuttle to a safe landing at Cape Canaveral. It’s literally beyond their limited abilities. What seems so simple to us is obviously quite complicated to them ... and they don’t even know how bad of a job they are doing until their little Johnny is on the evening news with a bullet in his head. “He told me he was going up to the recreation center,” said the distraught mother to a reporter, “I didn’t even know he was in a gang.”

Marian Wright Edleman, the director of the Children’s Defense Fund, was so accurate when she asked why do we feel the need to punish children for having the misfortune of being born to bad parents? She also asked: “What’s wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence… I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.”

Believe me, if media opprobrium had the slightest chance of working — the slightest chance of turning poorly raised and ill-equipped parents into effective ones — I’d be trying to knock sparks out of their collective asses in my column each and every week until the mission was accomplished. But it can’t and it won’t work.

So, why are some in the media hell-bent on engaging in this kind of useless didactics? One, it makes their readers think the writer is actually achieving something, and two, it’s self-aggrandizing. They obviously think that since they have a bully pulpit they can effect change; I think they mean well, and I sincerely wish they were right. But execrating these parents in print and writing nasty letters to their progeny actually is counterproductive inasmuch as it gives people a temporary, false sense of perverse satisfaction ... a feeling of “all we have to do is stay the course and beat up on them just a little more and these people will straighten right up.” Wrong. The problem of out-of-control youth will only yield to reasoned solutions — solutions that are applied at the actual beginning of the problem, not when it manifests itself years later.

Departments of Corrections in some western states use a combination of the rate of births to teen mothers, combined with high school dropout rates to determine how many new prison cells they’ll need in the future; that’s how accurately predictive these statistics are. We might as well assign prison numbers to eight out of every ten Black male babies born in public housing; statistics indicate they’ll eventually need one. Yet, armed with such accurate forecasts, what do we do? — wait until they are out-of-control teenagers and then act surprised at their behavior. If we were really serious about solving the problem we’d begin at the beginning wouldn’t we?

But we really aren’t interested in solving these kids’ dilemma, we only wish for peace and safety in our streets, not making the connection as to how we can achieve it by helping these youth when they really need it, and when it can do some good. Listen real careful to the demagogues and you’ll only hear them talk about protecting their turf, not about preventing the thug culture that threatens it.

The media is screaming for answers, so here’s one for them: The “answer” is... there is no “answer.” At least not the quick, easy one they’re looking for. These social problems were decades in the making and will only yield to some commonsense solutions — some of which will take at least a decade to show results.

Let’s at least try what’s working in other countries. Brazil pays poor people for good behavior. They’ve found that it’s cheaper to pay people to go to the doctor and stay well, rather than pay much more to provide medical care after they become ill. New York City is paying kids for good grades.

If we want to dramatically reduce the teen birth rate, pay young girls to not get pregnant. Of course it would be better to offer them some kind of future; some kind of stake in society they wouldn’t want to jeopardize with an early pregnancy, but that will take quite a bit longer. First we’d have to educate them. In the short term, pay them.

Do we really want to prevent young boys from joining gangs? Then offer them the same things that the gangs offer: Hope, and a way out of grinding poverty. Pay them to stay in school and try to get good grades. Hell, just pretend they’re White kids and pay them. Want their parents involved? Pay them, too. If we really want people to change, then we need to offer them some financial incentive to do so. We won’t have to do it forever, just until the cycle of poverty, low goals, and lower expectations is broken. The price tag nationally would be one-tenth of what we spend in Iraq annually... maybe even less.

These are far better solutions (with a real chance of working) than the ones I’m hearing, such as hiring more police officers to catch them after they’ve broken the law, stolen a car ... and mowed some innocent person down — which is the equivalent of closing the barn door after the horse is gone. How smart is that?

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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