Everyday I get up around 6, mess around for a while, and then head over to the "El" where I board a mini train and head to school. Always with a cup of coffee and a little twinge of anxiety, because I just don't know what is going to take place at school. I can plan and plan from my end (which definitely helps), but knowing students' reactions and attitudes is impossible from one day to the next. Anyways, as I'm on the El, the sights change quickly headed west on the green line. Art slowly disappears and the emergence of trash is alarming. There is one stop deep into the west side of Chicago, however, that has students art posted all over the station. Some of them look like they are drawn by grade schoolers, and others by teenagers. There is one that always grabs my attention, and not because of the picture, but because of what it says.
We Real Cool
We Left School
We Lurk Late
We Shoot Straight
We Sing Sin
We Thin Gin
We Jazz Tune
We Die Soon
This simple poem always leaves me thinking for a little while. Is it a gang member being proud of this pattern? Or is it someone realizing the unfortunate reality of their neighborhood? Either way it was written, I think that it is fairly profound. It all starts with a prideful mentality that step by step destroys a person's life. For most of my students, they live the first six lines of the poem, and have yet to figure out the last two, or the inevitable ending.
I refuse to believe that this is the way it is supposed to be. I have to believe it is the result of a failed system and the oppression that was created by it. Not everyone has the same opportunity. I have no reason to believe that if I (same DNA and everything) grew up in a family where my parents didn't care and where all I saw was hopelessness I would somehow develop a hard-working mentality filled with hope. Magically I would arise and overcome the need for friends in my community and have the knowledge to know the importance of education.
I doubt it. People come out of poor situations because someone else helped them in some way. Maybe with encouragement, maybe with finances, maybe with knowledge, and maybe, just maybe, by example.
People are not created to be lazy. Somewhere the drive was lost and the will was broken (many times in early childhood). The question is: What are we, as individuals, going to do to restore it? We all have our own strengths.
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9 comments:
Nice post, Jon. Thanks for your thoughts.
Good thoughts Watson. I hope there was an instant solution to poverty.
With this kind of people that wrote that poem. The problem is their attitude that they acquire, and unfortunately they are not going to change instantly.
For them to change the only solution is time,and discipline.
They will change by going to jail, to the hospital, or getting involved in a really bad situation. And thats when they seek God, or something to get out of their problem. Unfortunately society is creating people in this bad situation everyday.
I read that same poem somewhere before but it was like in 4th grade music class or something and I think it is being used out of context to mean something very scary. It still shocks me how people cant learn from others mistakes but they have to learn them by themselves. Why even have other human beings to follow their examples if everybody still does what they want. We humans are very stubborn creatures
Your post demonstrates exactly why hope is useless, we need self-responsibility. Silly liberals who believe that genuine hope is worth anything...
Sometimes I am so overcome with frustration by the far-right thinking that I only know how to respond with sarcasm. For the record: I think that a genuine and personal sense of hope would help lift people out their sense of dark fatalism.
Mark, Self-Responsibility can only be enacted upon for those that are free to decide for themselves what they should or should not do. Freedom is such a relative term, don't you think?
oh watty,
i think mark was being sarcastic in that comment?
Yes, I was being sarcastic. It drives me nuts when people deny the existence of systemic poverty and social dysfunction.
The poem is by Gwendolyn Brooks
"The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel."
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