Monday, October 20, 2003|
Bob Herbert once again chills us with the cold hard facts: "22% of all Chicago residents between the ages of 16 and 24 are both out of school and out of work," and even worse, "an incredible 45% of black men aged 20 to 24 are out of work and out of school." My heart sunk when I read his piece. 8:07:52 PM | I don't know why, as a society, we have been and continue to be so quick to dismiss such a large part of our population -- young adults. In Chicago I worked with the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a non-profit that hosts writing workshops with adults in public libraries and social service agencies and publishes the writing in an award-winning magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought. As you'd imagine, it was incredibly hard to raise funds for a venture aimed at adults. Our society has the idea that once a child becomes adult-like in appearance, they are no longer our concern. We will care about their kids (at least in a superficial way), but will leave them to the communities View from the Ground calls "abandoned." Some of the writers I worked with had been literally and figuratively abandoned their whole lives, by their own parents and families, their communities, their schools, and were now being told that they were entirely responsible for the problems all around them, whether the problems were in their neighborhoods, their families, or their personal lives. What was a failing of society in childhood becomes a choice in adulthood, a choice that separates the successful from those who fail. We believe so strongly in the myth of American opportunity that we insist adults are free to choose any life they desire, and that nothing stands in their way except their own personal shortcomings. (Their children, of course, are still "victims" in the eyes of society, and therefore eligible for the help we've deemed appropriate and necessary -- help that comes in the shape of programs that often ignore the essential needs of the parents like bus fare and health care.) I won't even get into how we've made prisons where schools should be, how we shuffle young people from abandoned communities to iron-barred cells (which are, in the eyes of many of us, a no-man's land, abandoned too, left out of our thoughts). Out of sight is out of mind, I guess, and that's where we hope to keep that 22%. 
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