That summer day, they stood in the alley that runs between Lennox and Reservoir streets in West Baltimore, an alley with splintered glass and clots of trash and all kinds of frustration coming to a boil in the afternoon sun.
Half a dozen of them, more or less. Neighborhood guys who’d come by for a few minutes, and some who stuck around for a while, and the talk was always the same.
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“How you made out?”
“Same old story.”
It was always about frustration looking for a job, filling out endless forms, knowing they were going through the motions with nothing to show for it at the end of a confusing process, and then wondering how they would get through the coming weeks without enough money.
One of the guys said he’d been out of prison for three years. The last two years, jobless. He said he went to the parole board, which is supposed to help with such problems, and the parole board gets him nowhere. So now the guy paced back and forth in the alley, and you saw the anger coming out of him.
“Two years, I been looking for decent employment,” he said. “I got to survive. You know what it’s like to have a toothache, and you need $10 to go to the dentist, and you got to hit a loan shark for that $10?”
“Sheet,” somebody muttered, “I’m gonna get that dime.”
“I have three years of upholstery training,” the parolee said. “I know the cuts, I know the material. But the questions are always the same. ‘Where did you learn your trade?’ ‘At the penitentiary.’ ‘What were you in for?’ ‘Well, I have a history of things.’ ‘Oh, lord.’ ”
The guys in the alley go back quite a while now, and I bring them up today because the years go by and nothing changes. Who do you think we find behind the crime that makes everybody nervous these days? The ones with no other employment.
Last weekend, as The Examiner‘s Stephen Janis reported, we had another in a series of city rallies intended to inspire everyone to lead upstanding lives and shame them away from crime.
This one, held at the same War Memorial Plaza where Barack Obama inspired everyone, was called Voices Against Violence. Mayor Sheila Dixon was there, and Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld and City Councilman Jack Young.
They were there specifically to decry the number of killings in Baltimore – six juveniles slain in the first four weeks of the year.
According to Janis, there were some very passionate speeches. Young told the crowd, “Parents need to stop being friends with their kids and start being parents.”
Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Baltimore Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called for a citywide symposium on youth to be held in 60 days to discuss education, health care and mentoring.
Well, that’s swell.
Hold another symposium, and never mind those guys still standing in the alleys because they have no jobs.
Hold another rally, and never mind those who come out of prison and have nowhere to go except the very professions that got them into trouble in the first place.
Hold another gathering of political figures, and never mind the failed war on drugs, now approaching the half-century mark, while the drug trade fuels so much of the crime across the entire country.
And now we find ourselves neck-deep in a recession in which the jobs vanish by the day. In January, the government says, 522,000 jobs disappeared. This is just from the private sector.
What happens to people in a tough economy? They develop alternative economies. The biggest is the drug trade, and this has been growing marvelously since the 1960s. It draws in millions, especially the young and the poor who figure out the game pretty early: The odds have been stacked against them.
Go to school, they’re told. But the classrooms are packed with sullen kids whose parents pay no attention. Homework goes undone, and reasonable bedtimes ignored. Classrooms are noisy and overcrowded.
For those who somehow survive this — go to college, they’re told. This is a national joke, which only worsens in the current atmosphere. College costs mushroom, and nervous banks are increasingly worried about making loans.
But, without that college degree, where do people go for decent-paying jobs? Where? Well, there’s always some underground economy — which leads, so often, to incarceration. Which leads to offenders eventually coming back out and looking for jobs which no longer exist.
And they wind up in the alleys like the one that runs between Lennox and Reservoir, where the frustration comes to a boil, and somebody will inevitably reach for a gun, which eventually produces these great rallies against violence that go on for years.
