Child Soldiers

In Chicago, between September 2007 and December 2008, 508 students were shot. That's more than 1 per day for those who don't want to do the math.
Violence is a rampant disease in the urban centers of this country, and all we get are new assault rifles for the police. Weapons that can shoot precisely up to 2 miles, through walls and cars. Because the police are pulling these same weapons off the streets at the rate of more than 1 per day. 1 assault rifle, 1 injured or dead child. How many more children will be injured or killed with the police now legally carrying these weapons?

Violence is not something that humans tend toward naturally. Not in a killing kind of way. Of all the moms I know who mother boys, they say hands down that their boys figure out how to make guns or weapons out of anything, even in pacifist homes. But they all say that this violence is not the same as the numbness and deliberate killing done by and to the children on the streets of Chicago. That type of violence has to be deliberately inculcated in children so that they might be used as soldiers on the streets.

Yes, violence is something that is taught. And it is not an easy lesson to swallow, as our natural instinct is to survive unscathed -- flight first.

While the media and the police feed the population the idea that bigger weapons and more protections are needed on the streets of the urban landscape, I can't help but see footage from our own nightly news sources, as well as various African and South Asian countries when this is brought up. Children hand-cuffed and led by the dozens into paddy wagons. Children scattering into the night as one in their midst holds a hand gun. Children holding guns aimed at tanks. Children planting hand made mines as the finely outfitted soldiers bear down. Children starving and surviving as they have been taught in order to outsmart and outlive the government whose guns and numbers are bigger.

No, bigger guns are not what we need. Might does not make right, and right cannot be enforced through the use of might.

What we face is patriarchal and hierarchal society, in which those on top get to the top by standing on those on the bottom. In order to rise, then, those on the bottom have to learn and use the tactics they see used by the oppressors. And while the US may have a pretty vision and a value system upon which we claim our moral high ground, it has been proven repeatedly that our words are just words, that we don't walk the talk, and that our citizenship will never be all inclusive in an egalitarian way. As long as we prefer to let might make right, to let our education system stigmatize and label us into classes, to perpetuate a caste system based not only on money but on the color of skin and the straightness of hair and the use of certain dialect, we cannot possibly expect that our children will be anything but soldiers in this war we wage against ourselves. It doesn't take a degree and statistics to see that our wars "on Poverty" and "on Drugs" are just economic fictions, created to boost some while keeping others in their place at the foot of the pyramid.

Our children are soldiers, fighting to get a pair of boots. Boots with which they can pull themselves up with, with which they can get a good grip on the heads and backs of those they will have to climb up and over in order to reach the top.