Day of the Dead

Tonight was Halloween, and it was just beautiful out. I mean it was around 70 degrees, the sun was setting red and the smell dying leaves was in the air as the little kids ran from store to store wearing wigs and funny glasses. While I took candy to school this morning and chatted with my students about their plans for the evening I couldn't help but feel fearful for them. Not because of the holiday and the impending threats of Nair being thrown and eggs being tossed, but because of the stabbing that happened last evening. You see the majority of our kids are Haitian or at the very least Caribbean in origin, and yesterday there was a stabbing in front of our school of one student by another over racial tensions between Haitians and Jamaicans. The kid was one of ours, in as much as any of the kids in the suspension room that I see belong to out program. I'd met him a few times, knew him well enough to say hello to him in the halls and had the opportunity to talk with him some about his reasons for being in the holding room, anger and fighting. Anyway I'd seen him that morning inside the school with a friend of his who I also know from the suspension room, they'd both said hello and checked in briefly with me.

He wasn't more than 17 years old, and they said that before he was stabbed in the back he was chased, beaten and kicked down. When he tried to escape to the safety of an empty cargo truck the driver kicked him out of the truck and forced him out into the crowd waiting for him. The boy is in critical condition now at the hospital. There were several other stabbings but those individual's names I did not receive.

Now the thing of it is that I've seen violence before. I've been lucky enough never to be involved in it, but there were fights and stabbings at the high school I went to, so the violence wasn't too new. No, the thing that got to me was that since I knew a little about this kid I started to wonder what was going through his mind when it happened-had he ever seen so much blood before? Had he ever seen so much of his own blood before? Was he scared? Did he laugh out of nerves as he was sometimes wont to do? Had he been given time to realize the severity of the situation? And perhaps more frightening for me- was this not new to him?
I wondered about him and about his parents. I wondered if they were around, how they would take the news, how they would reac- if at all. As it turned out, when the school contacted his mother prior to the stabbing to request that she come to escort him home because he felt unsafe, she told the principal that her son was not something she was concerned with, in exactly those words.
As I looked out on the police tape outside our office window I started to think about gangs, death, violence, and the disconnect that kids seem to have between being violent, having violence done to you, and imminent death. I thought about the child who stabbed him, for it was a child, and I wondered what was going through his mind as well. Why he felt that this was the acceptable solution to the problem. If he had felt pressured to prove himself in some twisted way and who was at the root of that pressure in the long run.
It made me scared. Not for my personal safety, but for every one of those kids. And it made me terribly sad. The kind of quiet sad that happens when the damage has been done and there can be no anger, no rage because the blame is spread so thin amongst so many possible sources that to try and sort it out to establish who to be most angry at would do nothing for the child in the end. No, the only rage I could feel was at the adult driving the truck who kicked the child out, and even then who knows what kind of concerns were running through his mind about his own personal safety. I couldn't say I would have behaved differently and I couldn't condemn him for his actions, though I absolutely wanted to.
To look at it honestly and in the broadest sense, there was a large and long running system of beliefs and oppression at fault combined with misconceptions of masculinity, honor, and duty, but what good does that do us now? We have no immediate solutions but to continue to fight with everything we have against that oppression and misinformation, to continue to educate and inform and assist people to rise up and take on true strength and power to question the status quo, to give the opportunity for real hope and success to everyone whose been placed low by any system, belief or otherwise. But that's the long run, and in the short run this child is lying unconscious in a hospital, so what then?
Today I had the opportunity to speak to the stabbing victim's friend, the one I had seen him in the hall with the day before and as I talked with him about violence all he could conjure up was thoughts of revenge. He said he wanted to corner the boy that did it alone and do some real damage with his friends. When I asked him what the point of jumping a person was he said that once a person sees who you roll with they don't mess with you alone. When I suggested to him that this was precisely what he was planning to do to the kid that had jumped his friend he didn't have an answer.
This 14 year old and I talked about life, death, self worth, goals and personal safety for somewhere around an hour and while I'm sure most of what he was saying was simple bravado, I couldn't help but want to shake him and scream at him to look around him and open his eyes, to convince him to stop talking all that trash and run in the opposite direction while he still could. The thing of this kid that got to me was that he had sought me out to ask if he should talk to the dean of security about what he knew, and while we chatted about it all I could think about was his baby face, his small stature, his youthful inability to grow facial hair as of yet, and his age. All I could think about was that he was a child. A fucking kid, and whether everything he was saying was false or true, the fact was that he was beginning to speak in these ways and plan things out, and believe that getting revenge in that way was an alternative to be explored, made me almost wanted to hurt him. I was extremely close to grabbing him and, like I said, shaking him long and hard.
It was so obvious to me that he was scared and that he didn't have any designs to do himself what he was suggesting, but when I posed to him the possibility of his friends pressuring him into it, or the possibility of being there and panicking with the awareness of the task at hand, he again had no answers. He couldn't tell me he would back down, he couldn't tell me he would have an out, and that was the most despairing thing I've ever heard come out of a child's mouth next to total resignation, which was close on this boys heels anyway.
It hurt me deeply to see kids in these predicaments and to think that even if it was all talk, at some point they were forced to decide between talk and action and many of them, without support and guidance, without somebody to still have faith in them, would likely chose the negative action. So my question to any or all of you reading this is how I fix this, because I desperately want to. I very much have the urge to take all of these children, sit them down, and have some miracle conversation that will change their focus, but I don't know what words to begin with. All I can think to do is rationalize with them about their own lives and goals, talk with them about what death means and what involvement in shit like this means, and plead with them to be careful and to think before they act. All I can think to do it become supportive, but even that doesn't seem like enough, hell I know its not enough because as I sit there trying to build up a supportive place for these kids, they are busy getting stabbed and plotting revenges that involve guns and fear. And while for the long term I'm setting up structures of support and working towards larger change, for the short term there is a boy lying unconscious in the hospital who once told me the only alternative was to stand up and defend yourself with your fists, only in his unlucky case someone chose a knife.