A mother's worst fears
An-Janette Albert talks to CNN's Don Lemon about losing her son, an honor student, in a senseless street brawl.
Is An-Janette Albert right when she say, “We've become a bunch of onlookers and rubberneckers, watching while an entire generation destroys itself.” Have adults become afraid of youth and the violence that is prevalent around many of their communities. Albert is the mother of Derrion Albert, the Chicago honors student who was killed recently when he was hit in the head with a railroad tie and then stomped and kicked as he lay injured during a fight just blocks from his high school. The 16-year-old was a good kid who some say was trying to help out a friend or just happened to walk into the middle of a melee.
During a heartbreaking interview with CNN, An-Janette touches on what I think is one of the primary reasons that some teenagers are running wild: fearful adults. An Janette said, “I believes they are afraid. If these kids are beating kids in school with sticks, what do you think they are going to do to a woman trying to take her bags and stuff out the car? I'm afraid. I'm scared of standing out on the porch," Albert said when asked by CNN's Don Lemon about the role adults could have played to stop this tragedy. "I don't want to go anywhere, and I don't want my baby to go anywhere."
Why should we fear sitting on the porch in our own communities, bringing groceries from the car or (dare I say it) disciplining one another's kids? One write wrote about an incident where his wife and him were waiting for an elevator in an apartment building while visiting a friend. A young lady walked in and was unwrapping an ice pop. Once she got the wrapper off and put the blue ice in her mouth, she threw the wrapper on the ground. All of a sudden the writer’s wife yelled, "Pick that up now! Who's supposed to clean up after you?" The young woman immediately bent down and picked up the wrapper and apologized. Not only that, her friends began ribbing her for being a litterer and not caring about the cleanliness of her own community. She knew what she did was wrong; she just needed a responsible adult to remind her.
Now from listening to that story it is clear that what some of our youth need is reinforcement of certain morals and values while others need to know what are good morals and values because they didn’t learn it at home. Adults shouldn’t be afraid of their own children or other people’s children. However from using that story as an example, the writer who talked about it wanted to make sure that he was in clear in saying that we as people should not run to the corner and wrestle the gun from a drug dealer's hands, but instead adults need to get themselves together and take control of their own homes and communities. Adults had to know that the fighting at Derrion Albert's high school was a chronic situation. An adult should have been there to yell, "Put that board down. Take your behinds home."
Now more than ever, we need adults to intervene in young people's lives before they pick up a gun or a board. After tragic events like this, we always hear about how there aren't enough after-school programs or how we need better schools or more police presence. We should come together first and then the resources to deal with the problem will line up behind us. In fact, these resources are not going to come close to solving the problem unless parents, relatives, neighbors and friends step up.
President Obama sent U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to Chicago Wednesday to talk about the violence there. I hope the message he delivers is: "We will provide resources, but the most important resource is you, the parent." An-Janette can barely make it through the interview without breaking down. She is amazed, as we all should be, that no one stepped in to help her son until it was too late. "If that was anybody's child...there's no way in the world I could have just stood by and watched that happen...to anybody," said Albert. Neither should we.
Therefore the question of are adults afraid of youth and the violence, is one that perhaps can’t be answered by me because I don’t speak for all adults. However the reality is that if some of our youth are afraid to simply walk to and from school and feel safer in school than in their own homes or neighborhoods than I can imagine how some adults feel than since many of them are not in a school building. I also can imagine how some educators and personnel staff feel when they are with many our youth on at least 5 days a week for 8 or more hours.
The reality is that our youth today can smell fear like a lion or tiger can smell its next prey. Many of our youth today have no fear of death or harm because many of them know or have developed this mindset that their life will be short lived anyway so why not live it to the fullest and do harm or damage to anyone who stands in their way. Thus the real issue for us as adults is to ask ourselves why should we fear anything especially since many of us are religious people and we know that our God will protect us and deliver us with the protection necessary to fight our when necessary. Now what I am not saying is for us as adults to go out and challenge a robber who wants our wallet or our car because that is just foolish.
However what I am saying is that we as adults should be willing to tell our youth to pull their pants up, stop the cussing and most of all tell our youth to stop the fighting or the arguing when it seems like it is about to happen. I am not too far removed from this generation of violence and I can say that a lot of our youth today don’t really want to fight but instead just want attention. You see youth who want to fight don’t do a lot of talking and smack talking but they just fight, however those youth who do, really are telling adults please stop this before something bad happens because neither one of us want to fight but instead we don’t want to seem like a punk or soft in front of our quote unquote friends so we have to shout and yell at one another as if we are tough.
Our youth need attention and guidance so as adults we can’t be afraid to meet them where they need the help the most which is not always in schools but sometimes at the corner or at the ball courts or where ever youth in our communities gather. Now I know we can’t save our youth but perhaps we can save more youth than we are saving if we as adults just reinforce our authority and our will over our communities. We can’t expect President Obama, AG Holder or any other politician to do for us the people of this nation that we are unwilling to do. Until we as adults work with youth to help protect and prevent them from destroying each other than we are simply allowing the madness and the war on our youth to fester to a point that we are witnessing genocide to a generation of young Americans that could ruin our nation’s strength in the future.
Now is the time to end this war on our youth and to stand up to our youth and the violence that is festering everywhere. Our youth need our help and us as adults need to meet this challenge with as much energy and vigor as we have met previous challenges in our nation’s history. This is the call to action that all Americans need to make sure we solve so that the world can see we are serious about the future of our nation by protecting our youth and giving them the opportunity to have a better present than their past and a greater future than their present. This is the call to action that we as Americans must stand up for. We must end the war on our youth and stop being afraid as adults and as youth!
SAVE OUR YOUTH!
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2009/10/04/lemon.mothers.worst.fears.cnn
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