Listen to the Children

A wise man once said that youth is a time to clothe oneself in rainbows. It’s a season of hope, a heady dash past life’s dangers, a laughing, leaping adventure that defies fear the way stars defy the night.

But if what a poet says is true, why would a kid just 16 years old look me in the face and say, “We’re all afraid, all the time”?

Why would the dash past danger become the slow, wary movement of a small animal surrounded by predators?

Why would a young woman say to me there is no hope of ever avoiding the armies in the streets?

Why would a young man say that fear of death is a constant companion, in school and in his own neighborhood?

Because this is a different kind of youth the kids endure, and there are damned few rainbows in their lives.

I come to that conclusion after a morning at Hamilton High, west of downtown and south of that most privileged of all places, Beverly Hills.

I went there to speak, but I stayed to listen, and what I heard were kids crying out for a place in the world where territorial imperatives don’t exist, where guns are banned and where no one has to be afraid anymore.

That doesn’t mean every moment of their lives is given to combat or that Hamilton High is an especially dangerous place to be.

But a perception exists among the kids I heard that there is enough danger to damp their joy, and what rainbows exist are shrouded in storm clouds.

I approached my morning at “Hami High” with the reluctance of a child being dragged to a dentist. Public speaking isn’t the best thing I do and I’ll avoid it whenever possible.

But we all owe something to the next generation and my way of giving is to say if a short, impoverished, half-Mexican kid with bad skin and big ears can make it this far, so can you.

There was also a compelling tone to the invitation by teacher Martha Carter. She said these were special kids who weren’t afraid to speak out, and that James Berk, at 32 one of the youngest principals in the school district’s history, was a guy who encouraged that kind of freedom.

I found both to be true, and if there is salvation ahead for a generation wary of walking at night, it might be found in just that attitude.

There are special circumstances that lure me to this topic. I came from a high school in East Oakland not unlike Hamilton High. We were blue collar, we were mixed races and we were tough.

But guns didn’t abound on the streets back then, there were no drive-by barrages to duck and little kids didn’t die in their mothers’ arms with bullet holes in their heads.

We had rainbows in those days.

In Martha Carter’s class, and to some extent in two other classes, I heard how much the rainbows have suffered in this generation.

A kid named Joe, his voice barely a whisper, told me his best friend had died the night before when someone shot him down at a hamburger stand.

A girl named LaToya told me how cousin will fight cousin because they’re in different gangs, and how mother and daughter, both members of the same gang, will ride together seeking armed vengeance against a rival.

“And the thing is,” she said, “there’s no way out.”

They belong to gangs, they told me, simply to survive.

They belong to gangs, they told me, because of the excitement.

They belong to gangs because when their own parents aren’t there, a fellow gang member--linked to them by a beeper--is.

They belong to gangs, one of them said, “because maybe we just want to die.”

What little patter I had to contribute paled in the face of these realities. The kids talked mostly to each other, Latino to black, white to Latino, black to black.

Sometimes there was hope among the hopelessness.

“You have choices,” Ron said. “You don’t have to belong to a gang. You don’t have to carry a gun. It takes a man to use his fists and a coward to pull a trigger.”

“But there are a lot of cowards out there,” Joe said softly.

“I don’t want to get killed,” Alex said. “I don’t want to die.”

“I quit a gang,” David said. “I found my little brother wanting to be like me. I smacked him good. And then I quit. I didn’t want him like me.”

It was a day at school I’ll never forget, a moment of listening to bright, sensitive kids wanting to stay young for a while, but being afraid to.

I walked away both saddened by their fears and impressed by their candor. And I walked away wishing someone would give them back their rainbows.