www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 21
Today's big-city way of life for two boys in Chicago
In earlier chapters we saw something of the daily way of life for us in a few sample times and places of the past. In this chapter we will see a sample of today's daily life for some of us who live in a poorer area of Chicago. This will also serve as a human example to introduce the statistics of the social and economic indicators of the next chapter. We will see that in 1996, 20% of our children were living in poverty. Those of us who have not lived in the poorer side of town hear only rumors of this daily-life and form a vague picture based on few facts. The story of the lives of two boys, Lafeyette and Pharoah, will help put you into their shoes and will give you a more accurate picture of life in the ghetto and what it means for our civilization.
We saw in Chapter 15 that Chicago was incorporated in 1833 as the U.S. was expanding westward. At that time the area contained both land-speculators and mud of legendary magnitudes. Cyrus McCormick moved his reaper factory there in 1847 and was involved in the 1886 Haymarket Square riot. By the 1860s, Chicago mills were sending many types of products to the east. In 1881 Swift began shipping meat in ice-packed railroad cars. The Pullman railroad car strike occurred in Chicago in 1893. By 1900, Chicago was an industrial and commercial colossus; young people flocked there to work and live. By 1910 it had a population of 1.5 million persons–second only to New York City. Chicago had 1,000 bombings during the prohibition of the 1920s; there were 1,500 murders during the years 1926 through 1929 alone. Al Capone made $100 million per year in the illegal alcohol business. For Chicago history, see www.chipublib.org/004chicago/chihist.html. Visit www.camelotintl.com/historyinmotion/pathe_footage/1929.html for a video of Al Capone.
The following pages contain a summary of Alex Kotlowitz's There are no children here, the story of two boys growing up in the other America. In the summer of 1987, Lafeyette was twelve years old, Pharoah was nine. Lafeyette and Pharoah's parents are Paul and LaJoe Rivers. Their parents are separated so Paul is not around very often. Kotlowitz spent several days per week with this family over a two-year period. He witnessed about half the events described in his book, and he talked with family members again after the events took place. The events that he didn't see firsthand, he recreated by questioning multiple participants. He also interviewed one hundred other persons, including friends, neighbors, school teachers, police, local politicians, court personnel, and Chicago Housing Authority officials.
The boys live in one of Chicago's poor areas. Their home is one-block from the Chicago sports stadium and one mile from the downtown business district. It is easily seen from the observation deck of one example of the capabilities of our civilization that is the 110-story Sears Tower, see www.searstower.org. In 1850, when its buildings were still relatively new, this was a prosperous neighborhood of Chicago. As in every city throughout history, the older sections of town become home to poorer persons as the buildings age and their rent decreases. In 1889, a house for poor European immigrants was built in the part of Chicago where the Rivers would later live.
The Rivers live in the seven-story Horner apartment complex. The residents often refer to the area as "the projects." Horner was built in 1956 with aid from the 1949 Housing Act that was built on the 1937 Act. For more information, visit www.hud.gov/offices/ogc/usha1937.pdf.) Horner is part of a large complex that houses 140,000 persons–along with 60,000 unregistered guests–and has 60,000 more on the waiting list. In 1987, Horner was home to 4,000 children and 2,000 adults. The Horner building, like many others throughout the city, is managed and maintained by the Chicago Housing Authority, see www.thecha.org. For Horner news reports, search for “Horner housing” at http://wttw.com/search.
The 1949 Housing Act was meant to create 810,000 units of low-rent housing across the nation. The people who designed the Act were trying to improve the quality of life of some poorer citizens of the United States. They felt that the stated ideals of America as the "land of opportunity" and the nation whose people are allowed the "pursuit of happiness" was shamed by the fact that too many families were living in substandard homes with little hope of an improved existence. (In Chapter 15, we saw that already by the 1840s, some of the poorer residents of Boston were living in flooded basement rooms.) The 1949 Act helped to create affordable housing that would provide a more humane existence to some less-fortunate Americans. Since many communities did not want to have the new low-rent buildings in their area, they were mostly placed at the edge of existing ghettoes. This then added an additional generation to the life-span of the existing slums.
The family of LaJoe's mother had earlier moved to Chicago from West Virginia, where LaJoe's grandfather had been a coal miner. LaJoe's father had been living in Arkansas when he also moved to Chicago to find work; he got a job in a steel mill. In 1956, when LaJoe was four years old, the family moved from a barely-standing building into the brand new Horner apartments. When the family moved into Horner their furniture consisted of a picnic table and some cots, but they had increased pride and the future seemed bright and full of hope.
They were thrilled with the immensity of the five-bedroom apartment and with its shiny new paint. The apartments are made of cinder block and have unplastered walls. The bedrooms are ten by eleven feet (3.9 x 4.3 meters) and have a two feet wide (61 cm) doorless closet; the closets were designed to have curtains but no curtain rods were ever installed. The living and dining areas are separated by a wall that extends halfway across the room.
When Horner was built, it had light poles in front of the building, a playground, and a regularly-mowed baseball diamond. Children liked to roller-skate in the basement of the building. There was a nearby boy's club that had both a gym and a pool. The area had a 250-member Drum and Bugle Corps that marched in city parades. Mom was active in the local democratic party. The area residents organized and fought for better schools and health clinics. There was a sense of community, which we have seen is important to us humans. Many Horner residents were successful persons.
The hope for improving America that began with the 1949 Housing Act has suffered from funding setbacks. The Chicago Housing Authority is responsible for the maintenance of the Horner building and for many others. This agency suffers from dwindling operating funds because those of us humans who set funding levels keep slashing those funds. By 1970 the Chicago Housing Authority no longer had enough money to paint the buildings; they used to be painted once every five years. The Reagan administration (1980-1988) cut funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 57% during its tenure in office. The Community Development Block Grant was cut 28%, and the Urban Development Action Grant was cut 68%. Federally subsidized housing was cut 95%, from 27 down to 1.5 billion dollars. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was almost shut down. For eight years, the programs originally designed to house the poor and encourage home-ownership were manipulated to benefit the rich who had strong political ties. A federal special prosecutor found that $2 billion had been lost to fraud and mismanagement and convicted some staff-members of wrongdoing. (See the section The Roller Coaster of Changing Administrations in Kurian's book.)
LaJoe saw the neighborhood decay. First the middle-class families moved away to the suburbs and then the businesses left. One-third of the city's manufacturing jobs left within an eight-year period. The area's official unemployment rate was 19%. In 1982, Mother Teresa setup a soup kitchen and a shelter for the women and children of the area. Kotlowitz reports that through the years 1987 through 1989, the neighborhood had no theaters, libraries, skating rinks, bowling alleys, or any other type of children's entertainment. There was no drug rehabilitation center, though drug use was widespread. The area had three aid centers, one of which had funding to support just twenty-eight children. The infant mortality rate of the area exceeded that of many third-world countries. About half the area's population was living below the poverty line, and half the residents did not have a telephone.
Horner's building conditions were simply allowed to worsen through time. The baseball diamond was paved over years ago; nobody can remember why. One side of the basketball court has a leaning hoop and the other side has no hoop at all. The building's first-floor mail boxes often get broken into, so Lajoe, who lives on the first floor, has her government assistance check sent to a nearby check cashing store. That store charges her $8 to cash each monthly check. The light bulbs in the building's hallways are broken-out by gangs who are trying to make it harder to be seen. These bulbs are not frequently replaced so the residents use flashlights to make their way down the halls. These flashlights were handed out by a campaigning politician. In many places, the floor tiling has worn through to the concrete. The medicine cabinets of two adjacent apartments are actually formed from a single piece of metal and so have been used to crawl through during robberies and assaults. The thin sheet metal of the kitchen cabinets has rusted through in many places so that the dishes have to be stacked around the hand-sized holes. Chicago's elevated trains pass within 100 feet (30m) of the apartment; the residents simply stop talking whenever a train roars by.
The apartment has a tub but no shower; the children have never experienced a shower. Since the faucet in the tub won't shut off, boiling hot water continually runs. The Rivers try to dampen this noise by closing the bathroom door. The tub is used to wash their clothes–and also the dishes, whenever the kitchen sink quits working. The boilers continually breakdown in the Horner buildings. The garbage chutes are too narrow to handle the trash, and the building is full of roaches. There are maggots in the over-full, garbage incinerator area. The River's first-floor apartment has two bathrooms and five bedrooms–and usually twelve residents. (When her oldest daughter moved back home along with her husband, her two children, and her brother-in-law, there were then twelve residents in LaJoe's house.) One toilet periodically releases the odor of spoiled meat.
After many years, the basement source of the odor was found during a building inspection. In 1989 the basement was inspected by a new manager who reported finding roaches, sewage, garbage, junk, dead rodents and other animals. The sight of this caused the manager to vomit. In addition, the basement contained 2,000 appliances and replacement kitchen-cabinets, some of which were brand-new but would not work because they had rusted while being allowed to sit in water. Many appliances had been pilfered for their motors and wiring, which was taken to be sold as scrap. Many tenants were angered to learn that they had gone months with broken appliances while the authorities let their replacements rust in the basement. People had lived over this filth and stench for fifteen years before the Chicago Housing Authority "discovered" it.
When an apartment was vacated, the Chicago Housing Authority used to have the money to make it ready for the next tenant. Now, many are simply boarded up. The heat and water remain operating in the vacated apartments though nobody is living there, so these vacant homes are often broken into to be used by gangs or drug dealers. Often, area residents remove the sinks, toilets, and metal piping from the vacated rooms to be sold as scrap for a few dollars. One year, just before Christmas, a homeless group broke into some Horner apartments to have a place to live. The Chicago Housing Authority tried to remove them over "liability concerns." The tenants often shared hot food with these temporary neighbors.
A 1982 audit by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found numerous problems with the Chicago Housing Authority. For example, they didn't know how many apartments were vacant–or even how many they had in total. They found that one-third of the elevators were not working, even though the buildings contained five to fifteen floors. None of the 2,288 employees had ever been laid off or fired. The audit said the Chicago Housing Authority was operating in a state of profound confusion, that nobody was minding the store, and in fact, nobody genuinely cared about the residents.
Eighty-five percent of Horner households are headed by the mother. The father is gone and is often un-respected by his children due to his absence, drug use, or unemployment. There is a caring and well-liked, fifty-year-old man who looks through the garbage of nearby businesses for discarded balls, plastic jewelry and flowers and such which he then gives to the area residents.
LaJoe gets some of her clothes from a second hand store because items there sell for forty cents compared to the forty dollars that other stores charge. The rest of their clothes are purchased through lay-away (this means that the store will set aside, or "lay away," your purchases while you make payments on them). She arranges for the lay-away purchases to be paid-off at the three times of year that coincide with Christmas, Easter, and the start of the school year. One Christmas, in addition to clothes, she bought Lafeyette a radio, Pharoah an Atari game, and each of them a ten-dollar watch.
LaJoe received $931 per month in welfare and food stamps. She spent $8 to cash the check (almost 1% of her income). $122 rent is 13% of income. The reason for spending $80 per month (9% of income) on burial insurance for her children will be obvious in the following pages. She spends about $300 (32% of income) per month on clothes, school supplies, and soap and such. The remaining $400 (43%) buys food.
LaJoe combined her monthly allotment of $400 in food stamps with $142 from one of her married daughters to buy $542 worth of food. Once a month she would go to the grocery store and buy a list of items, like the following, for twelve household members to eat. Fifteen packs of bacon, eight packs of sausages, twelve dozen eggs, six loaves of bread, eight packages of hot dog buns, ten packages of hamburger buns, three gallons of milk, six gallons of orange juice, two gallons of apple juice, four six-packs of fruit juice cartons, six packages of sliced American cheese, twelve boxes of cereal–including oatmeal and grits, twenty-four cans each of ravioli, soup, peas, carrots, mixed vegetables, applesauce, creamed corn, whole corn, baked beans, spaghetti, peaches, fruit cocktail, tomato paste, tomato sauce, twenty-four boxes of corn bread mix, four packs of hamburger patties, fourteen round steaks, two canned hams, seven packages of chicken, four packages of pork chops, eight pounds of ground beef, twenty packages of hot dogs, four pot roasts, two pounds of veal, four packages of beef liver, ten packages each of salami and bologna, four packages of ham, eight packages of frozen perch, two boxes of frozen fish sticks, six boxes of spaghetti, twelve boxes of macaroni and cheese, six cans of spam, fourteen cans of sardines, sugar and seasonings, and assorted fresh vegetables including cabbage, onions, carrots, lettuce, collard greens, tomatoes, and potatoes. She also bought four packages each of cookies, doughnuts, and Danishes. As a special treat, she would buy oysters for Lafeyette and pears for Pharoah.
In 1986, president Reagan's Secretary of Education found Chicago schools to be the worst in the nation. By that time, the area's residents had already spent twenty years protesting for better schools. In 1964, a Chicago Urban League study found that inner-city schools received only 66% as much money per student as did those schools located in more prosperous areas. During the 1980s, about 40% of Horner area students dropped out of school before finishing high school (compared with 25% nationwide); of those that begin high school, about two-thirds dropped out before finishing their senior year. The Horner area schools lost funding for all of its art and music classes in 1980.
Our civilization must not deny our children their opportunity for an education. We hold those children in our hands during those twelve years of school. If we fail to educate our children then it is equivalent to discarding them, their lives, their potentials, and the contributions they would have made to our civilization. Do we do this to save a few dollars? To this description of poverty and poor living-conditions, we next add today's drugs, gangs and violence to get the remainder of the picture of life in the inner cities of the U.S. Those of us humans who live under these conditions often grow to have feelings of hopelessness.
Kotlowitz reports that there are forty violent crimes per 1,000 Horner residents, compared to an average of 6 per 1,000 in the U.S. today. (Violent crimes are assaults, rapes, robberies, and murders.) Every three days, someone at Horner is either beaten, stabbed, or shot, mostly over drugs (remember that Horner's complex is just 8-blocks long and houses 4,000 children and 2,000 adults). Of the fifty-seven children who were killed in Chicago in one year, five died in the Horner area. In 1981, there were so many shootings in one 2-mile-long, 15,000-resident housing project that the mayor of Chicago moved the police in for a three-week stay to restore order. It was as if the government had invaded a third-world country. The police were just eight blocks from the mayor's own residence. The violence goes on and on and on and nobody gets used to it. Nobody goes out at night.
Gunshots are a common occurrence. When gunshots are heard, Lajoe moves the children into the building's central hallway. She makes them stay there until fifteen minutes after the gunfire has ended. Bullets have entered LaJoe's apartment When gunshots are heard during school hours, all the students in the class habitually get down on the floor. In certain housing areas of Los Angeles today, some teenagers say "you know that you are a gang member when you see your family take cover from gunfire by getting into the bathtub." All of the areas children, including Lafeyette and Pharoah, live among this violence. Lafeyette was given $8 on his birthday to buy earphones for his radio. On the way to the store, gunfire broke out. As is their habitual response, the boys instantly dropped to the ground. (From the Sears tower you could have seen them ducking the gunfire.) When they felt it was safe they forgot about going to the store and instead headed for home. During those tense moments, Lafeyette lost $7.50 of his birthday money.
Three days after Lafeyette's birthday, there was gunfire outside the apartment as two rival gangs fired at each other from the windows of two high-rise buildings. During the shootout, the school-day ended so children began to leave the school building, which is across the street from Horner. Pharoah started to walk right into the area of gunfire, so LaJoe and Lafeyette yelled out of the window at him. He stopped. Then he ran and ducked from one tree to the next. There were police officers in the area but they had mistakenly thought they were the targets of the gunfire and stayed in their car. Pedestrians lay motionless on the ground during the gunfire, as is their learned response to this common event. Nobody was hurt and no arrests were made. Kotlowitz later called the police headquarters and found that there was no record at all that this had occurred. Kotlowitz points out that Lafeyette and Pharoah knew the gunfire had occurred. (For news archives, visit http://chicagoreporter.com/Gizmos/Navigation/Archives/archives.htm.)
The gangs are there to sell drugs. They have wandering sentries using walkie-talkies to warn others of approaching police. They mark out territories by marking the buildings with their symbol–for example, a star. The members identify themselves by wearing certain colors or designs or by twisting their hat to a certain side. They will attack rival gangs who try to sell drugs in their area. If members of one gang enter the area of another gang they will be beaten, shot at, or killed. Gangs store their guns in a "safe house," which is often a nonmember's apartment. This person will be paid in money or drugs for the use of the apartment. Most of the drugs are sold to people who live outside the area; they drive their cars into the area just to buy drugs. Drug customers park at the gang's building and then wait for the drugs to be brought out.
The police never catch gang leaders with any drugs on their person because they do not handle the drugs themselves; they have their helpers do that. No Horner resident dares to report drug dealers to the police for fear of being hurt or killed, themselves. If you were to call the police and they came to your door to talk to you then everybody would know that you were the one who had called the police. It is usually the lower ranking gang members who are arrested. While serving time in local jails, gang members often recruit new members into joining them. Drug gangs in the U.S. become involved in other things. For example, one Chicago gang leader was imprisoned for taking $2.5 million from Moammar Ghadafi to bomb buildings and airplanes in the U.S.
The high profits from the manufacture, distribution, and sales of illegal drugs have resulted in this situation, and it is affecting the entire world. The U.S. appetite for drugs is responsible for much havoc in those countries growing and processing those drugs, including Columbia for instance. If you buy illegal cocaine to “have a good time,” you are directly responsible for the resulting misery of the war-ravaged people of Columbia. Some people in the U.S. are buying and using drugs because life seems hopeless; this shows that we have much work to do freeing our own nation from injustice. Some nations treat drug addiction as a health problem while others treat it as a criminal activity. Which do you think it is? We see that gangs are wreaking much havoc within our own cities, just as it did during prohibition. Will this end when we legalize marijuana, hospitalize addicts, or put 0.5% of our population in jail for drug usage? (Today, about 0.5% of our population is in jail for drug use.)
Gangs often recruit young children to do their dirty work. For example, near Horner they recently had a fourteen-year-old boy shoot a member of a rival gang. The gang members know that the courts treat children less-harshly and that the children cannot be held in prison past their twenty-first birthday; they are rarely held more than twenty days. Gang leaders might buy groceries and shoes for the neighborhood residents who need them. They sometimes throw neighborhood parties with food, games, and live music, and show off their expensive cars to impress youngsters.
When LaJoe's oldest son Terence was just ten years old and not yet in the sixth grade, he was taken up by a gang leader. (He dropped out of school in the seventh grade.) He was taught to handle a gun and would earn as much as $200 in a day. Though he was only ten years old, he would leave the house and not come back for days or even weeks. When LaJoe went to that drug dealer to demand her son back, he responded that "Terrence is his son now." LaJoe repeatedly had the police get her son but he would remain at home for just a few weeks before leaving again. Once Paul went with his son Terrence to see the drug dealer. The dealer told Paul that "It's Terrence's choice to be here." Paul responded that "Terrence is just twelve years-old. You are taking advantage of him." When Paul made more forceful threats, he was suddenly surrounded by the drug dealer's helpers. One of them reached into a sack and asked "Do you want me to pop him." Paul and Terrence were allowed to leave unharmed, but the thought of his father being killed was enough to scare Terrence into staying home for a while. When describing this situation, inner-city parents say "I lost my child to the neighborhood and to the lure of gangs and drug money." Some parents will nearly lock their child within the home and say "Thank god I have a thirteen year-old child who is still mine."
Terrence said he was most-affected when he saw that his mother was so fed up with him that she quit giving the world to him. He became a father at the age of fourteen. By eighteen, he had been arrested forty-six times. Terrence told his younger brother Lafeyette to stay in school and to keep to himself: "Stay away from crooked people and tell them 'no' if they ask you to do something for them."
LaJoe has three children who are older than Lafeyette and Pharoah, and triplets who are younger than them. The three oldest have dropped out of school and have each been in jail. Her oldest daughter has worked as a prostitute to support her drug habit. LaJoe knew of people who had managed to move out of the area just to find the same conditions elsewhere. LaJoe says she would die before letting a gang take another son. She vows that the lives of her younger children will be different because she will not allow the same mistakes to be repeated. The younger ones will have a childhood, graduate from high-school, move away, get good paying jobs, and raise a family. She is the guidepost for her children.
Lafeyette refused to play with a certain group of children because they would try to get him to join their gang. Lafeyette says that the only way to make it out of the projects is to make no friends and to keep to yourself. Then you will not get talked into joining gangs or participating in illegal activities. He says that he is going to move to a classy suburb that has 4-foot high (120 cm) flowers growing everywhere, and "you can sit out all night and nothing will happen to you." The boys sometimes argue about whether there is any place that doesn't have gangs.
When Lafeyette was ten years old, he saw a man stumble into their building and die of a gunshot received during a gun battle just outside their home. The blood stains were still visible two years later. Two weeks after this incident, another gun battle broke out while the kids were outside playing; one nearby girl was shot in the leg. Lafeyette and Pharoah ran and hid in some trash until it was safe to come out. When one gang used machine guns and shotguns to kill a rival gang member, even this neighborhood was shocked at the viciousness of the attack. Once when a fifteen-year-old gang member was shot in broad daylight, a crowd gathered around the body. Pharoah vividly recalls how the dead-boy's sister repeatedly wailed "He is not dead."
The gang that murdered the boy also threatened to interrupt his funeral; they said they would storm the funeral and turn over his casket. This caused the boy's family to keep the funeral arrangement as quite as possible. The funeral's preacher commented that the only chance he has to talk to some young people about the love of God is while they attend funerals. There was a general feeling among the young people at the funeral that they too might not reach adulthood. These moments often gave Pharoah a piercing headache and once caused Lafeyette to ask Pharoah if there were stores in heaven. The never-ending knife and gun violence is what had prompted LaJoe to purchase the funeral insurance mentioned above. A while later, both boys refused to attend a family funeral because they hadn't yet gotten over the previous one. All these murders and deaths occurred in the summer of 1987. At the ages of twelve and nine, Lafeyette and Pharoah knew more funerals than weddings.
The violence and anxiousness caused Pharoah to begin to stutter. He also began to tremble when he heard loud noises. A few weeks after the later funeral, he fainted when bullets tore past the living room window. After that, he began to spend much time staring into space. He showed more life while at school because he felt safer there. Pharoah worked hard to compete in the school's annual spelling bee contest. He spent three weeks studying a fourteen-page list of words and came in second place. His teacher took the class on trips to nearby museums so that the children could see that there is life outside Horner.
Lafeyette saw three teenagers throw Molotov cocktails through the windows of the apartment next door. This also was not reported in the press. The burned-out apartment simply remained boarded-up for the next two years. Lafeyette began to deal with bad events by not talking about them. His face no longer showed much emotion except for fear and loneliness, but his darting eyes missed little. He said that he has no friends, “only associates," because friends are someone you can trust. Lafeyette once commented "If I grow up I'm going to be a bus driver." Kotlowitz points out that Lafeyette had said "If I grow up" rather than "when I grow up."
Ricky was Lafeyette and Pharoah's friend. Ricky saw his cousin shot to death by people who he said "did not feel sorry about hurting someone," and that this began to make him too stop feeling for other people. After that incident, whenever Ricky got into in a fistfight he said "he began to relive his cousin's last moments," and that this makes his anger turn into such a rage "that he doesn't even care if he kills someone."
LaJoe was robbed by two teenagers who were armed with a knife. During the robbery, they severed the nerves between two of her fingers. LaJoe grew more short-tempered from the daily worries of shootings, gangs, her son's stutter, and her daughter's drug habit. She said she felt as if her insides were being shredded, and that if she knew beforehand what her children would have to suffer through, she would have return them to her womb. LaJoe was once reminiscing about her and Paul's earlier dreams of moving into a wood-frame house that had a backyard, a fence, and a porch where they could sit in rocking chairs and grow old. Then her older son Terrence was arrested for armed robbery, and the Department of Public aid informed her that her aid would be cut off because they had learned that her husband sometimes stayed with her. They learned this by reading Kotlowitz's first newspaper article about the lives of Lafeyette and Pharoah. KotLowitz used the $2,000 he was paid to pay Terrence's bail.
LaJoe describes the area by saying that "There are no children here" because they have seen way too much. By the time they reach adolescence they have confronted more terror than most people encounter in a lifetime. They are forced to make choices that more experienced adults would find difficult. They live with fear, and they experience death. This causes some young people to lash out by joining gangs, selling drugs, or even inflicting pain on other people. LaJoe says that, at the same time, they show they are still children by playing baseball and marbles and such.
A mentally-disturbed woman, Laurie Dann, entered an elementary school in a higher class part of Chicago and killed two students and injured six others. This was in the national news. There were calls for more school security and a team of crisis-psychologists were brought in to help the students deal with the event. Two days later at the Horner school, a nine-year-old was shot by a stray bullet during a gang fight but nothing was said in the press.
In the summer of 1988, two men broke into a Horner apartment to steal a television and video player, which they sold for $120 to buy drugs. During the robbery they killed the mother, her boyfriend, and her four-year-old daughter. They also stabbed an eight-year-old girl forty-eight times and left her for dead. But when she was found the next morning she was still alive and was able to testify against her attackers.
Chicago is located in Cook County. In 1988 the Cook County Criminal Courts saw fourteen perjuries 103 briberies, twenty-three impersonations of physicians or judges or government officials, 260 indictments for official misconduct, twenty charges of obstruction of justice, 3,647 aggravated and heinous batteries, eight charges of possession of explosive devices, 993 caught with burglary tools, 162 home repair frauds, 380 home invasions, 1,312 charges of unlawful restraint, 830 kidnappings, 84 jail escapes, 8,419 rapes, 1,584 armed robberies, 135 accusations of unlawful use of a weapon, ten police officers disarmed, 73 gambling charges, five food stamp frauds, 3,101 thefts, 232 attempted burglaries, 6,160 burglaries, 81 charges of intimidation, one unlawful discharge of hazardous waste, 1,219 bail bond violations, 867 forgeries, 388 arsons, 156 charges of deceptive practice, 429 retail thefts, 2,568 auto thefts, 269 incidents of armed violence, 104 reckless homicides, three solicitations for murder, 953 attempted murders, 1,905 murders, six charges of endangering the life of a child, four child abandonments, thirty-six charges of cruelty to children, one reckless homicide of an unborn baby, two involuntary manslaughters of unborn children, seven intentional homicides of unborn children, 53 child abductions, seven solicitations of juveniles, one juvenile pimping charge, 174 child pornography charges, twenty-seven charges of taking indecent liberties with children, fourteen incest charges, and 10,518 drug charges. This amounted to 24,390 cases and 56,204 charges heard by just thirty-two judges.
A short distance from his own home, Lafeyette found an apartment building that had a grassy area. He would go there to sit on the grass and read comic books or just daydream until the security guards would run him off. In the fall of 1988, when he was almost fourteen years old, he and a friend were caught shoplifting at a video store. They were not arrested; they were just properly scared by the store personnel. This made LaJoe worry that she was about to lose another son to the neighborhood.
The Chicago stadium is close to the Horner neighborhood and is home to two professional sports teams, the Bulls and the Blackhawks. When there were sporting events, the area would be flooded with the cars of fans. Lafeyette, Pharoah, and many other Horner kids would earn a few dollars of spending cash by helping fans find parking spots and by guarding their cars against damage or theft. On game nights the entire area was lit up. There would be so many police cars and officers that the drug dealers have to close down for the night. That closure of drug dealing made the residents wondered why that sort of police activity did not happen every night. They asked why do the police protect sports fans but not Horner residents.
On one such night, a police officer told Lafeyette and his friends to go back home and to stay away from the stadium. Lafeyette either talked back or was too slow to move, so the officer grabbed him by his collar, threw him into a puddle of water, kicked him in the rear, and then called him a punk and told him to that he wasn't supposed to be working here. Two of Lafeyette's friends ran home and returned with LaJoe in time to find Lafeyette in the back seat of the police car. Then, two more officers arrived and let Lafeyette go. One officer told Lafeyette he might get hurt out here at night. Lafeyette responded that he had lived here all his life and had never been hurt except by the police. This made Lafeyette begin to question his relationship with the police. It was also the first time he ever showed bitterness toward another person. Lajoe worried that Lafeyette would become cynical toward the police because they had roughed him up.
The Horner residents have mixed feelings toward the police. They know that some genuinely care about the children and that they have a dangerous job. They are shot at while on patrol, and objects are often thrown at them and their cars. But they also believe that some police officers think they are bad people and mistreat them.
The next Christmas, LaJoe took her family on a bus ride to the center of Chicago to see the decorations. The children enjoyed seeing the tall buildings and the people with their fashions. LaJoe remembered coming here with her own mother and eating the best popcorn she had ever tasted. She bought carmel popcorn for her children. Then, two acquaintances of the family had an argument in LaJoe's house. One of them pulled out a gun and fired several shots while everyone ran for cover. Not long after that, LaJoe's daughter LaShawn gave birth to a baby boy who tested positive for cocaine and opiates.
In the spring of 1989 Lafeyette's friend Craig was shot by a law enforcement officer who had mistaken him for another person. Craig was a special role-model for Lafeyette because he maintained his ability to dream aloud about the future while most everyone else said that it was no use to even bother. Craig had recently graduated from high school and was pursuing his career as a disk jockey. (We saw above that in the projects, only 60% of us graduate from high school.) Medical exams found no trace of alcohol or drugs in Craig's body. The police said he was a suspected gun runner and member of the Disciple Gang even though his name was not on their list of 18,000 suspected gang members. The street where Craig had been shot was not part of the Disciple Gang's territory. The police did not apologize to Craig's parents, or even send flowers to his funeral.
The death of Craig convinced Lafeyette that he could be shot or jailed at any moment for doing nothing. He became depressed, collapsing in bed right after school and sleeping for long hours. His distrust of others grew and his memory began to fade (for mental stability, no doubt). He said that if he were Craig's father he would go shoot that police officer and that he hoped the officer would die. Two days after Craig's funeral, Lafeyette lost another friend who was driving in a stolen car with four others. When the group passed a police car they sped off and lost control, killing three of the five boys. When LaJoe told Lafeyette about this, his facial expression didn't even change. He just said "He's gone, just don't talk about him." Lafeyette then began to have mood swings. One moment he would act with a hot temper, show fury and revenge, and then the next moment he would show generosity and maturity. He asked a friend if he had ever thought of suicide. One month later, as the rest of the family moved to the building's hallway during gunfire, Lafeyette just sat at the television.
When Lafeyette was thirteen years old, he and three friends commandeered a vacant apartment, chose a certain earing for their symbol, and began to call themselves "The Four Corner Hustlers." They were not dealing drugs, but they were practicing for the real thing. The school then labeled Lafeyette as a gang member. One of the boys had a gun. When he was once shooting at the feet of the others, he accidentally shot one boy in the arm. The four boys would talk about how they wish they could be young again at an age when most are wishing they would grow-up and are thinking of the future. Kotlowitz asks how could the Horner boys be expected to think of the future when it took so much just to think of the present.
Lafeyette's brother Terrence was next given an eight-year sentence for armed robbery. LaJoe said that her children were her strength and her love, and when they are taken away from her its like taking a part of her. "They're what she didn't have, and she had them in order to get it." At this time a man made threats at her for refusing to go on a date with him. She lost her self control for a moment and said that she couldn't take much more, that she had to get out of this ghetto life. She worried again about losing her children to the neighborhood. She wished she could take her children and move away but knew she couldn't pay rent anywhere else. LaJoe paid a swindler $80 because he claimed he could get her name put at the top of the list for subsidized housing, and enable her to move out of the projects. The swindler was soon arrested.
One day Lafeyette came home to find his dog missing. He accused his father of selling the dog for drug money and called him a dope fiend. They had a terrible argument. Paul slumped down into a chair knowing that his son didn't respect him due to his drug usage, and knew that he didn't respect himself either. The dog was then found in the kitchen.
Lafeyette was also discouraged that his cousin Dawn, who had graduated from high school a year ago, still didn't have a job and was unable to move away from the projects. It worried him that even a high school diploma was not a guarantee that he would make it out of the area and have a better life. Lafeyette had little to believe in because everything and everyone were failing him. Lafeyette had a recurring dream of running from something that was chasing him but not being able to get away because of a strong wind. He would try to call for help but no sound would come out of his mouth.
Lafeyette and Pharoah saw their first rainbow while they were walking to a store. Pharoah ran toward its end because, like other boys, he believed that you will get a wish if you catch it. After it disappeared, he came back and said that if he could have caught it he would have wished to get his brother out of jail and his family out of the projects. He then held back a cry.
Pharoah was selected for the University of Illinois Upward Bound Project for math and science development of sixth through twelfth graders. During the orientation meeting each student was asked what he or she wanted to be when they grew up. Pharoah answered that he would be a congressman so that he could build houses and move everyone out of the projects, and that he would also put every gang member into jail. He enjoyed going to the University each morning, getting away from the neighborhood, and feeling like a scholar. This was also the year that Pharoah was given his first birthday party.
LaJoe was walking down the street and saw two boys shooting at two other boys who were wearing the red colors of a rival gang. This time it was especially troublesome for her because the shooters could only see the backs of the other boys. They didn't even care to know for certain at whom they were shooting. LaJoe then made Lafeyette stop wearing red colors, hats, earrings, or anything else that could be mistaken for gang symbols and be shot at.
In a two-week period there were six shootings. A few weeks after that, Lafeyette saw a friend run out of the building shot in the stomach. The violence never let up and nobody ever got used to it.
Lafeyette and four other boys were next caught running away from a vandalized car. Lafeyette said that after seeing one boy smash the window, he ran away to avoid being blamed. At court, the judge did not even look up at him while rattling off questions about his name and age. Yet worse, a few minutes later the judge did not even remember that he had just questioned Lafeyette.
The Public Defender, Anne Rhodes, said that she defends hundreds of children at a time. She has just a few minutes to interview them while they are waiting to see the judge. She has seen children taken away from their parents after a five minute abuse-and-neglect trial. She complains that she is supposed to be helping her clients but that there just isn't time. She is scared by the overload of cases, the absence of parents, the hastiness and confusion of the trials, and worst of all, the inattention to the children. She says that "our kids are our future and we are not doing our jobs." In Lafeyette's trial, she had to defend all five boys but was given only five minutes to talk with all of them about the case.
The judge found the boys guilty though none of them had been seen smashing the window. The judge said he had no doubt that the boys did it, and it didn't matter that they claimed they were innocent because "they always do." He said that "they were a threat to the public, out there breaking into people's cars." During the trial Lafeyette was not given a chance to talk or to declare his innocence, and was mad that the one boy didn't admit to having broken the window. Lafeyette was sentenced to one year of probation and assigned one hundred hours of community service at a boy's club. During this service, he found that he enjoyed teaching children how to catch balls.
While LaJoe was walking down the street, she saw several boys beating on one other boy, and she saw Lafeyette in the middle of them yelling for them to stop. LaJoe ran up and pushed her way to the center, trying to stop them as she yelled at the boys. Just as it looked like the boys were going to turn on her and Lafeyette, another boy ran up to help. Then everyone dispersed. On the way home Lafeyette dropped to his knees and said "I'm tired mom." She helped her son to his feet and knew that he was just tired of being.
In the inner-cities today, it is common for half the men to be either jailed or killed by age twenty-five. Knowing that that is your future can result in a feeling of hopelessness for some young men. It shows the strength of human character that 100% of us do not turn to drugs or crime in such a situation. How are Lafeyette and Pharoah doing today? Kotlowitz helped Lafeyette and Pharoah get into a private school that was two miles from their home. Most of its five hundred students came from the projects. It was strict and made students work hard, enabling 90% of them to go on to college. Lafeyette lasted almost a year and learned a lot. You might like to visit www.seedfoundation.com for information about its public, college preparatory, urban boarding schools. Visit www.buildingexcellentschools.org for information about starting an inner-city charter school.
Vincent Lane became the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority and set out to regain control of the projects from the gangs. He said it would take $30 million and much time to cleanup all 125 buildings. He began by cleaning up eight of them. He cleaned the basements, gave paint to the residents, bought new playground equipment, planted flowers, built a library for the children, built a security entrance with 24-hour guards, and reopened nine hundred apartments. The tenants were grateful for him.
For photos and personal accounts of life in the projects, visit www.viewfromtheground.com. You might like to visit http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5101a1.htm to read some recommendations concerning inner-city housing. The economic development programs of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development can be seen at www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/economicdevelopment/programs/index.cfm. You might also like to view some videos from the webcast archives at www.hud.gov/webcasts/archives/index.cfm. See http://chicagoreporter.com/1998/03-98/0398horner.htm for a photo and news report of the new Horner buildings. To fight unjust housing conditions and policies in Washington state, visit www.tenantsunion.org.See www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/welfare/jan-june01/housing_6-20.html to view a June, 2001 PBS Newshour segment about demolishing and rebuilding Chicago’s public housing.
In summary, this is what is meant by social and economic injustice. It causes thirteen-year-old children to fall to their knees because they have become "tired of living." Has your thirteen-year-old child said this? What would you do if your child came to feel this way? How many such children should we allow to be placed in such a state in our civilization? Do you think the Horner kids have the same opportunity to pursue the limits of their talents as do the rest of our children? What is more important in human civilization than our children? On which things are we wasting effort better spent on ensuring opportunity for all of us? Why do we have such an inequality in wealth and opportunity? When did it begin? How great has it been in other times and places around the world? How great will we allow it to become? How do we arrange our civilization such that this way of life occurs as infrequently as possible? The answer is to measure the success of our attempts to form a just civilization; this is the only way for us to know if we are making improvements. This will be described in the next chapter. You might like to view the video Hear Our Voices-The Poor on Poverty produced by The World Bank, search for this title at www.worldbank.org.
What are some of the biggest "secrets" of social and economic injustice in the U.S.? Here are a few of them. In recent years about one in five children are living in a home whose income falls below the poverty line, yet no mention of this is made by either Democratic or Republican presidents, legislators, or candidates. In the daily news, there is little discussion about poverty or the inequality of wealth and income, but a second-by-second report is given for stock market averages. Does this mean that the people of the U.S. care only about money and not about our children or the quality of their lives? We now have two cabinet-level departments–Defense and Homeland Security, involving our military defense and offense, but we do not have something we might refer to as the Department of Children’s Well-Being, Department of Life, or the Department of Happy and Healthy Children and Communities. There is much talk in the air about “the land of opportunity” making all of us rich, but in reality very, very few of us are going to become millionaires. Nearly all of us die in the same economic class in which we were born. My Dutch friend Hester says that a difference between people from Europe and the U.S. is that Europeans do not assume they are going to become rich. Meanwhile, those of us who live to acquire wealth display much talent in that field because the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population owns 40% of the assets. (This means that just before dying–as does everyone–the wealthiest of us can shout "I have as much money as the poorest ten million persons.") Our wage depends on our educational level: high school graduates earn the average wage, college graduates earn 50% more, and those of us who do not finish high school earn 50% less than that average. But for the people of forty-five out of fifty states today, one person in ten cannot afford to attend any college at all. During the years 1970 through 1996, the average U.S. wage fell by almost 20%; meanwhile, the income of the wealthiest of us increased. The highest paid corporate executives–for example, some of those in the pharmaceutical industry–now receive an annual income of one billion dollars. In 2004, the world’s seven hundred billionaires held $2.2 trillion in wealth, which is about one-fifth of the 2004 gross domestic product of the U.S. and 4% of the world’s $50 trillion dollar gross domestic product. According to the Merrill Lynch and the Capgemini Group’s World Wealth Report almost eight million persons, which is about 1% of us, hold more than one million dollars in financial assets, for a total of almost $30 trillion dollars.
One out of ten of those of us humans who live in the Horner complex has an artistic ability that is among the top 10% of the artistic abilities of all persons in the world: one in one-hundred of us Horner residents are among the top 1%. Similarly, 40% of the children at Horner have talents and abilities that are among the top 40% of all children's abilities to become mathematicians, generals, politicians, priests, and scientists and such. Too many of those of us humans who live at Horner are being restricted from pursuing our talents. We instead spend each day simply getting enough money to buy bread and pay rent.
Our civilization consists of thousands of activities; each of us is born with our own level of talent and interest for each of these activities. Each of us has our own collection of special talents for certain activities in which we excel, but too many of us are denied the opportunity to pursue those talents and interests. The progress of our civilization is restricted whenever we restrict the opportunity of some of us from pursuing the limits of our talents and interests. In the industrialized nations today, many of us are restricted in this way. You might like to compare this portion with that of those of us who live the life of gatherer-hunters or village farmers. We have seen that life within bands of a few families is egalitarian, that our farming revolution resulted in a small amount of inequality, and that our Industrial Revolution greatly increased the inequality among us. This is not to say that we should abandon our farming and industrial ways–because these have provided health, intellectual, and material benefits–but it is to say that we have not yet finished building our civilization. We will know that we have finished building our civilization when it is the case that nobody is restricted from pursuing the limits of their talents and passions. What are some of us now doing instead of pursuing the limits of our talents and abilities to improve ourselves and our civilization: we are spending each day trying to earn enough money to buy bread and pay rent. When persons are not allowed to pursue the life of their choice because they are forced to spend the day this way, then much of their life is being determined by others, and, not only is their life being limited but so is our civilization because it is not benefitting as fully as it would from those of us whom we are restricting.
Barnet and Cavanagh explain that to be free to pursue one's own life today requires that you were born a millionaire. Our millionaires have to decide what to do with their lives, and what life–for them–is all about. Together, we have to decide how to arrange our civilization such that we are all allowed the unconstrained pursuit of our own lives. We will know that we have finished building our civilization when it is the case that each of us is as free as is a millionaire today to pursue our own life and the limits of our own talents.
Part of the purpose of this book is to think carefully about what is a human and about what life should be. Many of us feel that the meaning of life mostly involves raising our children, while others feel it involves the pursuit of knowledge or self-improvement, the attempt to pursue the limits of our talents, the acquisition of factories or of factory-made utensils, sports, fashion, or any of a thousand other things. We want to decide how we should arrange our civilization such that it is the tool that allows each of us to pursue what we feel is important.
The general population is becoming more able to choose the goals of civilization as a whole due to the increased control over its operation acquired during the last few centuries. Today we are able to choose goals simply by casting a vote. Recall that the fifty members of a band of families chose together the goals of the group. Those of us humans who live the life of gatherer-hunters have goals that mostly involve the health and happiness of our children and communities. Throughout our ancestral generations, groups of several families would pool efforts in the avoidance of predators and in the search for food or in its capture, herding, or cultivation. An extended family might briefly pool efforts to attain the goal of erecting a house, as we saw done by the Kalapalo. We have seen that a group of hundreds of humans will pool efforts to solve that problem which prompted the union in the first place. We saw that the these sorts of unions are often categorized as tribes. Whenever thousands of us humans get together, we will pool efforts in the goal of building large structures from dirt or rock; these structures are tools for living. Attainable goals grow in magnitude with the number of involved humans. How do we choose goals that our six-billion-member civilization will attain? We do that by deciding what is most important to us through a careful examination of ourselves and of our own nature. Everyone agrees that the needs of our children come first and, after that, those of our family and of our community of cooperating persons and families–because these things form the nature of a human. We are parenting mammals and social primates who live for our children, family, and community.
If you are having trouble deciding your highest priorities then you might list the things you would be doing today if you knew you would be dying tomorrow. It’s a safe bet that, during our last day, not too many of us would be concerned about acquiring more money or a few more assets. What do you suppose a Kalapalo woman would do differently today if she knew she would die tomorrow? We will know that we have finished building our civilization when its main concerns match the daily concerns of a human: our children, family, and community–not money, power, or war. Most of us feel that success in life means having happy and healthy children and communities.
Each species of social primates has its own version of mutually beneficial society. We humans naturally form our own version of a primate social system. Through the last ten thousand years we have also been building a civilization that has extended our social system. In this way, human civilization is our tool for organizing groups of persons having numbers larger than our innate band of twenty to two hundred individuals. Through the centuries, we have continued to develop our idea of the proper and just civilization. Today, we view the just society to be that which recognizes the worth and dignity of the individual and allows all members the unrestricted pursuit of happiness and the unrestricted attempt to fully realize their potential. We want to pursue the limits of our artistic, technological, scientific and other intellectual talents and interests. Each one of us is important–equally important. When our civilization allows each of us to no longer be restricted to a mere daily survival then each of us can spend our lifetime striving to improve ourselves and our civilization. Nature made us human, and from this beginning, we continue to build the civilization of our choosing. Our civilization represents us humans. We want our civilization to be the tool that frees our minds and spirits.
Today's advanced science and technology are the result of our understandings of nature obtained by making repeatable measurements. Business today measures the success of its attempts to become more profitable by counting its money before and after each of its actions. The U.S. Constitution states that to govern is to promote the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness of the people. Our government is not yet fully measuring the success of its attempts to govern, but it is guaranteed that it soon will be doing so.
The next chapter contains a short description of some measurements that are already being made but are not yet being combined by our government into a full picture of the quality of our lives. As these are combined, we can begin to relate changes in the quality of our lives and well-being to changes in governmental policies and actions. The goal of our government is to produce the highest level of living for as many of us as possible by measuring the success of its actions. With each successive generation, we will then move closer and closer to the most-just civilization.
Questions
1. Should the government fund such housing projects? What portion of the people should need assistance before funding is made available? Why does this portion of us need such assistance?
2. Why are some of us rich while some of us are poor? How can we become unrich and unpoor? Can't those of us who are poor just move to another part of town? Can you come up with a few thousand dollars to move today? What percentage of us could come up with this amount of money? Can you come up with a similar amount of money for the sudden expense of a car repair? Have you been able to move from the class of your birth into an upper-class neighborhood? Is life about classes?
3. Most of us are closer to LaJoe's income-level than to the levels of the rich. LaJoe's annual income of $12,000 is 5% of the $216,000 income that the upper one-fifth of us receives. Calculate your annual income as a percentage of $216,000.
4. Compare your family's monthly food purchases with those of LaJoe and with those of other people. Also compare with a family that lived in the U.S. in the year 1820.
5. Compare your daily life with that of ghetto, middle-class, and wealthy persons. What are the most important aspects of life for the persons of each of these groups?
6. What percent of Americans live in such conditions as occur in the Horner neighborhood? What percent of the nation's wealth would be needed to modify these areas such that they have a more humane condition? Compare today's reform discussions to those describing the injustice of the sweatshops of the 1840s.
7. What can the Horner residents do? Say it takes about $50,000 to open a small business that will then earn about $50,000 in monthly sales and just $5,000 in monthly profits. If 100 residents each contributed $500 to form a group-owned business then they would each earn $50 per month. How many residents have $500 to spare? Is it workable for each of 1,000 families to contribute $50 and then obtain $5 each per month in profit shares? Can a $10,000 investment create a business that earns $10,000 in profits per month? What sort of numbers are typical for new business start-ups?
8. Can you numerically relate the amount of crime and violence in a nation to the average wage of its citizens or to the magnitude of inequality in wealth and opportunity?
9. Just as in every other business, the illegal drug business involves manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and retail outlets. How is the profit split among these sections? Where is the money? What are the expenses? Where does the street seller get the drugs? Should we legalize drugs, treat drug usage as a health condition, or double the prison sentences for drug offenders? How do other nations approach this issue?
10. How many blocks are in your town? How many blocks are there in your town's poor area? What percentage of your town's blocks are poor blocks? In recent decades, has this percentage increased or decreased?
11. Compare the costs of schools, parks, and libraries with those of drug enforcement, courts, and jails.
12. Compare the percentage of people living in poverty within gatherer-hunter, village farmer, and wage-earner societies. Compare the level of economic and social inequality among persons living in these three lifestyles. Has inequality increased or decreased as we shifted our ways through these three life styles? How do we minimize inequality? What would be a suitable level?
13. What percentage of the people of the U.S. are occupied as engineers, doctors, priests, and artists? What are these percentages for the Horner residents? Are the Horner residents being restricted from pursuing their talents and interests?
14. List some elements of each of the religious views from Chapter 13 in the lives of Lafeyette and Pharoah, and give some examples of the Golden Rule at work.
15. Did the Yoruba, Kalapalo, Mesopotamians, Ancient Athenians, Medieval Europeans or Chinese, Cahokians, or nineteenth-century U.S. farmers have to live amid crime and murder as did Lafeyette and Pharoah? When and why did such a daily life begin to occur for some of us humans?
16. Paint a picture or write a novel that shows how you feel about life for Horner children.
17. Compare the life-shortening situations of Horner children to those of the U.S. during the 1820s.
18. What portion of the U.S. population needed low-income housing during the years 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, 2000, and today. What changed about our way of life such that many of us do not earn a living wage? The U.S. government was not involved in housing in 1776. When and why did our government become involved?
19. Compare death rates and the causes of death among Horner residents during the 1980s with those of the general U.S. population during the years 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, 2000, and today.
20. Divide news content into several categories, including discussions of the quality of our lives, and then show the percentage of news time, or pages, spent on each of these categories. What percent of your government's actions involve each of these categories? What percent of your church's actions involve each of these categories?
21. Discuss the workings of the juvenile court system. The nuclear family is the basis of human life. Parents show their children how to be human. Under what circumstance is it beneficial for children to be removed from their parents? How can the existence of these circumstances be verified? What are the reasons that those harsh circumstances developed? Instead of removing children from their parents, is it possible to remove the reasons that created those harsh circumstances?
22. Compare the most important things in life for people living in gatherer-hunter, village farmer, and wage-earner societies.
23. Compare housing costs, policies, and conditions for the Kalapalo and Yoruba and in Mesopotamia, the U.S. in 1840 and 1990, Cahokia, and Medieval China, Europe, and Africa.
Primary source for the chapter
There are no Children Here, The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America, Alex Kotlowitz, 1992, Anchor Books, New York.
Suggestions for further reading
Five points, the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's most Notorious Slum, Tyler Anbinder, 2001, Plume, New York, New York.
All Souls, a Family Story from Southie, Michael Patrick MacDonald, 1999, Ballantine Books, New York, New York.
First They Killed my Father, a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, Loung Ung, 2000, Perennial, New York, New York.
When Broken Glass Floats, Growing up Under the Khmer Rouge, Chanrithy Him, 2000, WW Norton & Company, New York, New York.
The Rape of Nanking, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Iris Chang, 1998, Penguin Books, New York, New York. (See www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/ChinaHistory/rape.html.)
Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, 2001, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York.
Without a Net, Middle Class and Homeless in America: My Story, Michelle Kennedy, 2005, Viking, New York, New York.
The Natural History of the Rich, A Field Guide, Richard Conniff, 2002, WW Norton & Company, New York, New York.
Gig, Americans Talk About Their Jobs, edited by John Bowe, Marise Bowe, and Sabin Streeter, 2000, Three Rivers Press, New York, New York.
Working, People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Studs Terkel, 2004, The New Press, New York, New York.
The Working Poor, Invisible in America, David K. Shipler, 2004, Vantage Books, New York, New York.
The Word on the Street, Homeless Men in Las Vegas, Kurt Borchard, 2005, University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada.
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