Looking for the Easy answer or the Right answer?

Looking for the Easy or the Right Answer?

 The View from the Middle

Imagine that you’ve been having a consistent, stabbing pain in your abdomen and you recently began to experience blood in your urine.  You go to your doctor and after a lengthy examination, the doctor suggests that this is a product of nerves and all you need is a pedicure and a massage.  You might be relieved.  You like the sound of this solution.  It’s painless and relatively inexpensive.  Life is good!  Right?

Well, the same thing is happening in Baltimore.  There is a tremendous problem of violence, drugs and poverty in the black community there, and the solution is to hang the six cops that arrested Freddie Gray.  In addition, of course, we should spend more money on our crumbling, ineffective public school system in Baltimore.  Wow, I’m relieved.  That sounds easy and relatively inexpensive.  Now we can all go back to our everyday lives and assume all is well in Baltimore and across the country.  But the next time you go to the bathroom, there’s still blood in your urine.

I don’t agree with Elijah Cummings (D-Rep. from Maryland) on much of anything when it comes to policy and I often scratch my head at his dogged defense of Lois Lerner and the IRS.  However, his recent comments in Baltimore caught my attention, because I feel he is very close to the truth.

First, he said, “Our children are living messages that we are sending to a future that we will never see.”  That is very poetic and poignant, and I agree.  He also said that the problems in Baltimore are “broader” than just police interaction with young black men.  He talked about the need for education and training, which I agree with, but I want to take his comments to another level.

Elijah said that our young men and women need to be educated and trained, as if this is something that is done “to” them.  This suddenly made me aware that there are two sides to this equation.  There are things that we need to provide to our young people, and then there are things that our young people must take responsibility for.

Education is one of the keys to success in societies around the world, and there are responsibilities that we adults have to make sure our young people have the best opportunity to get that education.  Our young people then have a responsibility to take education seriously.  They need to go to school.  They need to study and stay in school.  They need to behave in school and not disrupt classes and they need to treat teachers with the same respect they so righteously demand for themselves.

There are still too many young black males in particular who drop out of high school or who are incarcerated and haven’t graduated.  Young black men are also less likely to go to college and way less likely to graduate from college than their white counterparts. 

The rules to avoid poverty are simple.  First, take your education seriously, graduate from High School at least and go to college if at all possible.  Second, don’t get pregnant before you are married and wait until you are 21 to do so.  Today, 70% of black births are out of wedlock (to be sure, the white rate is about 50% so there is need for improvement there), which leads to another problem, and that is single parent households.  God bless all the single moms out there, but that has to be the most difficult job in the world.  Statistics show that children from single parent households are four times as likely to live in poverty than children from two parent homes.

So the answer is simple.  Take your education seriously and stay in school.  Don’t get pregnant outside marriage and wait until you are 21 to do so.  And finally, fathers stay at home with your wives and help raise your kids.

Now, this is not the popular, easy answer like “go get a pedicure and massage” in my first example.  This is the message that says, “you have cancer, and you will have to endure surgery and chemotherapy to save your life.”  It’s not the fun answer, but it is what we need to do to save our children, our living messages to the future, from destruction.

And finally, we need to be relentless as we shout this message from every rooftop.  Every leader, black, white, red or blue needs to be reminding our young people about their responsibility in this “success in life” formula.  If we aren’t relentless, the music industry and the street will overwhelm them with a very different message every day.