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Sunday, Oct. 25, 2009

Predictions coming true

Forty-four years ago, Sen. Patrick Moynihan predicted a dim future for the black community. What has become known as the Moynihan Report was prophetic: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder ... are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable.”

Two weeks ago, a Gallup study sponsored by the Knight Foundation identified some perceptional issues facing the community from crime to education to the low rating young people in the survey gave the city. A Forbes study the following week placed Macon as the seventh poorest urban area in the country. Friday’s editorial outlined those issues again.

Early Friday morning, a person who always chooses not to identify himself, left this message on my voice mail responding to the editorial:

“You’re not being honest with yourself or your readers,” he said. “You know what the real problem is in Macon. It’s the same problem there is in Albany (ranked the fourth poorest urban area in the U.S.) If you want to know what Macon will look like if something doesn’t change, go and visit East St. Louis, Ill.” (East St. Louis had one of the highest crime rates in the country. It’s murder rate exceeded Detroit, Compton, Calif., Camden, N.J., Washington, D.C., and New Orleans in 2006).

A little later that morning, another caller left this message, again not leaving name nor number.

“You keep writing all these articles about what’s wrong with Macon, but you never hit on what’s wrong. The problem is ‘black.’ Black hands are stretched out all over the world asking for handouts. Give me something, all across the world. Wherever ‘they’re’ at. Write about what the problem really is. Have a black birth moratorium. That would help.”

As much as I would have enjoyed cussing them out, in some aspects, minus the obvious vitriol, they have a point. While they don’t see how they or their forefathers played a role in the condition of the black community, almost every statistic points to its dysfunction.

I feel we are close to a tipping point, that no matter what we do, the odds of reversing this trend are near impossible.

For those with much more education than I, a tipping point is a sociological term: “The moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”

When I look around Macon and listen to the young people, I worry. You know the quote, one that I’ve used before from the Rev. Ronald Terry. “We have raised a generation of young people that is lawless, godless and fearless, and it’s the combination that’s proven so lethal.” Damn, Moynihan was right.

I’m not one to present problems without solutions. It does no good to howl at the moon. First we have to understand that we have a serious problem that will take a generation to fix. And, we have to understand that in Bibb County, we are doing little to reverse the momentum. In fact, unintentionally, we are aiding it by focusing on tests that have no influence on whether we are creating good citizens.

It is a question of leadership, and that leadership has to come from a place where youngsters spend a good part of their days. At present, that leadership, and I include myself, is failing. More next week.

Charles E. Richardson is the Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached at (478)-744-4342 or via e-mail at crichardson@macon.com.