The teachable moment of Derrion Albert

 By now, commentators and pundits alike have had their way with the news clip, the societal implications, and territoriality motivated rationalizations of the cause of Derrion Albert's death.  But even after a week of listening to news of the story on one hour loops on CNN, NBC, NPR, etc., not to mention that every piece of print media ran the story continually for the same length of time, there are yet a few kernels of ideas that seem to have escaped the mainstream outlets, and so should be handled here.

In the aftermath of such a brutal, senseless crime, the first question immediately springboarding off every talking head's lips is 'what could have been done to prevent this?'  Well, to be quite blunt, many things, not the least of which would be inner-city after school programs dedicated to building students of upstanding moral character, sports, arts, and music programs to harness that youthful energy into constructive avenues and eliminate their availability of free time to become involved in gangs, life skills and job training programs for adults in the community and urban renewal development in the areas from which these children originate, to name a few things.  But all of this has quite literally been done to death about the very nearly perpetually economically depressed and underserved South side of Chicago (which is, in itself, a social commentary).  The sharp contrast to this is that almost exactly one week to the day  after Derrion Albert's life was taken, a second teen was severely beaten on the North end of Chicago - this one thankfully surviving, - but it still begs the question whether or not the video on the news has, or will, spark a rash of copy-cat events.

The question that's not being asked, almost universally, is why does our society have such a necessity for bellicosity at every turn? It's plainly clear to those that have turned on and tuned in for quite some time that the level of representations of violence in all modes of communication have increased dramatically over the last decade.  'Law and Order' was designated at its inception as one of the television world's most 'gritty and compelling' new series with stories 'ripped from the headlines' - even the descriptive language was itself violent.  However, how many spin-offs has it engendered? How many Crime Scene Investigation versions are there? How many iterations of Saw, Hostel, Halloween, and other gruesome material have played in movie theaters  and on cable television regularly? How many Smokin' Aces, Shoot 'em up, Death Race, Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible, 300, and No Country for Old Men movies have been floated across the screen? And while we're at it, just when is that latest version of Grand Theft Auto hitting the stores? The chilling truth, the terrible reality is that our 'great society' has done this - we created the monsters, and then we are horrified by their appearance.  We have become desensitized, and clearly entertained by anything that involves blood, guts, and death.  On prime time television, it has become almost commonplace to see badly disfigured bodies on the coroner's table getting crudely taken apart by medieval looking tools to investigate the cause of death, but Janet Jackson's flash of exposed - albeit finely decorated, as if planned - flesh causes a national scandal and includes fines with several zeroes at the end, though we are just fine with our stunning pornography of violence, thank you very much.

Disappointingly, this highlights another reality of the current administration's need to create a secondary effect that is a term frivolously batted around the airwaves ad-nauseum: Obama's 'post-racial' society.  However, even today ethno-centric violence is only newsworthy if a truly great tragedy erupts.  There's a back-story to the Derrion Albert news item: according to the NPR interview, 34 school aged children were killed due to violence around schools in the previous year.  Where was the reporting on them?  Where was the national outrage?  Where was the attendance by Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson of the funerals?  What is most shocking about this is that it took a randomly captured cell phone video submitted to the police in which it can be clearly observed that the person controlling the camera was capturing the video not because he had a half baked plan to submit it to the police, but because - as you can hear in his voice at the end of the video,- he's enjoying watching the show.  We can increase a show's Nielsen ratings, or a new movie's box office take home depending on just how much violence is contained therein, but our culture's vehemence is unleashed at the release of an image of a United States Marine mortally wounded after a rocket propelled grenade attack.

This all comes home to roost because of the recently highly publicized teen shooting outside of a car wash in Cambria Heights, just one section of Queens, NY like many others in our staggering urban development.  But the problem is far greater than these isolated incidents, it's far more epidemic and wide reaching than even the frequently reported swine flu 'pandemic' since it seems our very American concept of resolving issues with violence is now infecting European countries, and who knows how many other places that simply haven't managed to garner space in our national news stream.  It has been reported repeatedly that the Bloomberg administration has mandated changing the reporting on school violence to downgrade the level of the offense, and that negatively influences public perception of what the current situation inside of a school building's hallways truly is.

What we are presented with here is known in the education field as a 'teachable moment'.  We have the opportunity, right here and now, much as we do with the Iran situation and the war in Afghanistan, to create serious differences in the operation and unwritten curriculums of our schools, what values our students carry out of there, because if there is one concept that is terribly clear, there is no silver bullet solution to this problem because it is the relentless tide of negativity, the confluence of instruction to be a warlike society that is contributing to this situation.  So, while we're busy trying to paint lipstick on the bulldog of this country's egregious foreign policy errors from America's version of the 'lost decade', perhaps we should think globally, and act locally.  We can no longer allow zombiphied, lock-stepping, automatons to be cranked out of our educational institutions whose sole skill is writing essays for the Regent's (or whatever your colloquial version of that may be) exam.  All of that money currently being spent on testing needs to immediately be redirected towards any effort that will repurpose our students' lives toward a more productive existence.  We must restore sports programs, classes on civics, re-prioritize the value of foreign language classes, and perpetuate a deep feeling for the crucial importance of arts and humanities to the exclusion of testing in our schools for the simple sake of the survival of our own children.  It simply creates far too much pressure, and so far, hasn't proven anything.  The communities our children live in - regardless of the socioeconomic class, - need to be restructured so that no child has to live in squalor, or rely on a street gang for protection, or entertainment, frightening as that may sound.  Either that, or, we simply need to become entirely comfortable with the idea of being the modern world's version of an army for hire, and simply accept these events as the unfortunate, but necessary consequence of such training.

Years ago, there was a popular bumper sticker that read "If you're not horrified, then you're not paying attention".  Start paying attention.