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 Departmentof 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.
