Counterterrorism Strategies Could Work in Our Schools

While teaching for two years in inner city Baltimore, the same scene played out just about every day. Kids would tag the walls or halls of the school with whatever markers, paints or pens they could find. After school, our hard-working, sleepy custodian would then be carefully painting over them with silver or red paint – the colors of our school. “I got to do this everyday. “These kids,” he’d say.

Gang leaders recruit all types of kids. The smart ones handle the money and more responsibility. The ones with ADD or learning disabilities are typically the ones standing on the corners or running the drugs to and from. Girls are prevalent in gangs too; often, in order to get into the gang, girl’s are “sexed in,” meaning they have sex with many other gang members until proven worthy of acceptance into the gang. The kids who enter gangs are basically brainwashed; they are promised protection, prestige and a type of family environment they might not be getting at home. At least that’s what the Baltimore City Police Dept. detectives would tell us when they’d come and brief teachers about gang activities and wars. We had these briefings a few times per year.

Much attention is paid to the violent drug wars in Mexico. Not enough is paid to the drug trade fueled by deadly gangs on our streets. Thousands have died in Mexico since the government began battling like hell against the armed cartels. Thousands die in cities like Baltimore every year across our country; it’s not much better than Mexico, if at all better in the slums of urban America where gangs thrive and residents are held hostage.

The deaths of gang members or drug dealers (it’s of course too broad to say they are one and the same) are usually written up as little blurbs in the paper, if at all. BaltimoreSun.com has a little map checker where one can pinpoint where recent murders were. The dots represent humans killed. It’s eerie looking at it – to think how far removed one living in an American suburb can be from a city that is only a few miles away.

Gangs are too often dismissed as a result of urban issues such as bad schools, lack of job opportunities, institutional racism, broken homes, drug addiction and the like. They ought to be treated more as a cause of these things.

The counterterrorism strategy our military uses in Iraq and Afghanistan is “clear, hold, build.” Something similar is needed to sweep out gangs in this country, particularly in our inner cities, where huge numbers of residents feel they are held hostage by hot-headed, violent, destructive and angry young men and women.

This doesn’t need to be done by police, but by residents demanding to take back their cities. There are movements to end gang killings. There are brave and proud individuals and community groups who try so hard to combat the gang problems in Baltimore. The gangs and drugs and violence, which perpetuate the same old urban issues, are winning though, and it’s not even close.

I go into the city and meet with my students to run or talk about books I’ve given them to read over the summer. These are good kids and they come from good families. They go to church on Sunday, help their grandparents, and do their best in the awful school they attend. But across the street, there are kids chilling around in white tanks and blue K.C. Royals hats. They are there to show who is in charge of the neighborhood. And it’s sad because I know who is winning. I don’t even speak about it with the kids I go and visit; it’s unspoken that they are just trying to get the hell out of this city alive and with a possibility to live a better life somehow. I go not to preach about any kind of better life. I go to talk about running and the goals that can be set to achieve personal greatness. I go to talk about the universal themes and ideas that literature represents to people of all races and backgrounds.

Test scores just came out for the year and Baltimore City and P.G. county, a suburb of D.C., were in dead last in Maryland, a state that was awarded a title for best public school system in the country. The scores in the cities and slums don’t have to be so bad; they are a sign that people give up on each other and their country. There is no hope and no true freedom without an education.

We have more than enough political pundits in this country; we need more people discussing life and death issues like gangs and inner city violence and poverty and test scores that reveal that our nation is not equally committed to education as a civil right. These shouldn’t be treated as abstract “social issues” but as issues that make or break the heartbeat of our nation.

Inner-city America might never vote Republican, but the liberal ideal will only keep the blame game going. The liberal ideal keeps people dependent on a government structure that will never be big enough to clear the Crips and Bloods off the corner, hold them at bay while kids work uninterrupted in school to receive the education they deserve before they can come back to build tradition and foundation for generations of greatness to come.