"We Wait to Hate"

When I worked for CCG, one of the most interesting and rewarding clients we had was Baltimore Safe and Sound, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program site dedicated to improving the quality of life for children and families in Baltimore. Lots to improve there. Our initial set of focus groups we conducted to position the campaign yielded some poignant and insightful revelations. "When you go outside," we asked the young people, "what do you see that tells you that things aren't OK here in Baltimore?"

"Babies crawling on the steet."
"No nets in the basketball goals in the park."
"Hypodermics on the ground."
"Kids out at all hours with nobody watching them."

One young woman said, "Why can't someone give our parents home training?" Home training, we asked? "Yeah, like somebody needs to teach them. Like not to throw garbage out the window, but to get a trashcan to put it in."

The campaign had seven goals, ranging from improving prenatal care, to making sure kids entered school ready to learn. But all of the goals - and all of the problems - were interrelated, and systemic, and sometimes seemed insurmountable.

Hathaway Ferebee, executive director of the campaign, headlined one of the advertorials we created as "We Wait to Hate." She said, paraphrasing, that we don't ensure moms get good prenatal care, babies are born with low birth weight and struggle with cognition, we don't provide good pre-school education, kids start school unprepared, and through all of this we either feel sorry for them or ignore them. Then, they fall behind, drop out, hang with bad people, commit their first crime, and then we decide we hate them.

Thinking about this today after hearing the press conference in Chicago about starting a national conversation about youth violence. Someone asked Arnie Duncan why today people appeared to show up to hear this message when he has been giving the same speech for years. His answer was the power of video. Watching an innocent child get beaten to death moved people.

If only the problem wasn't so entangled. But it is. It's like a giant root system, underground. The predictive modeling program they've developed to identify and target the most likely victims and perpetrators may help. (And to Hathaway's point, they are the same group). But until we go oh so far back upstream and start with the addicted pregnant mom who needs inpatient drug rehab, which costs far less than the foster care her children will eventually need, until the systemic problems are fixed at their root, it's going to be a continuing game of Whack-a-Mole.

We'll get outraged, and many of us will hate.
God love and protect our children and their parents. We can do better.