Murder. It’s so charged with emotion that it’s hard to think rationally about it.
Here are two facts: The New Day reported that 14 people had been killed between Friday and noon on Sunday; 30,000 people marched under a broiling sun from the capital to El Morro in a demonstration against the savage crimes committed on our streets daily.
I didn’t march.
Not because I didn’t believe in the cause.
Because I think it’s the wrong approach.
And I was thinking of Harry, whom finally I saw last week. We talked briefly about a TED program he had seen given by a mediator who works in broken states, such as the Balkans.
Harry’s view?
We’re very close to becoming the Balkans.
And one of the first things that the mediator does?
Keeps young men busy.
Why?
They’re the ones killing.
OK—is that true? Well, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice…
…yes.
In the years from 1976 to 2005, 65.0% of killers were between the age of 18 and 34. And 52.7% of victims were between 18 and 34.
Oh, and men are nine times more likely to murder than women.
Bottom line—a guy in his twenties with nothing to do is dangerous. He drinks. He looks at other guy’s girlfriends. He joins gangs and starts abusing drugs.
He murders or is murdered.
So the Balkan guy says keep ‘em busy. Wear ‘em out. Get ‘em good and tired and they don’t go out to the pubs and drink until daylight.
They go to bed.
And train them to do something. Make them carpenters or bricklayers or furniture reupholsters or something. Just put them to work.
In addition, get them to believe in something. This is our island. I’m part of rebuilding my country. I’m making a better place for myself and my family.
Send them out and get them to fix things. The schools opened last week, and were predictably a mess. Dirty halls, leaking toilets, trash in the playground—the usual nonsense we’ve come to expect.
What were all those twenty-year-old guys doing all summer?
Drinking and killing.
There’s a lot of stuff to be done. Take the orange bus, as I did for seven years, down highway 1. Look out the window. There’s trash all over the place. Go out to the kiosks of Luquillo, but skip the alcapurria. Go to the beach instead. Same thing.
Here’s my plan. Every boy serves a year of National Service—picking up the trash, building park shelters, repairing toilets. At the end of the year, the kid decides—do I want to go to college? If so, and if he is accepted, then let him go to school. And monitor that he actually completes the semester.
A guy doesn’t want to go to the university? Then he goes into a training program for a skill of his choice. Teach him to be a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter. Then let him get a job.
And monitor that for a couple of years.
Expensive?
Sure. So is sending millions if not billions of dollars in welfare payments to able-bodied kids who do nothing until they murder.
The people who marched yesterday heard words that we all should value: respect, integrity, tolerance. But it may be that we need a discussion on a simpler yet vaster scale.
We gotta tire these kids out.
