Editor’s note: Voices is a weekly column that provides a platform for Central New Yorkers to comment about the issues of the day. If you’d like to submit a column, email Larry Dietrich at ldietrich@syracusenew times.com.
The Sept. 21 attack on James Gifford, 70, hits close to home. Home for our household is Syracuse’s South Side. I was born here nearly 70 years ago.
Most mornings for the past 18 years, we’ve taken our black Labs for their morning run in Elmwood Park, a stone’s throw from the 7-Eleven parking lot where Gifford was beaten to death.
Like most people, I can’t fathom such bullying, nor what makes the perpetrator tick. But bear with me a moment while I explain why such bullying isn’t so far from our lives as we might like to think.
I know little of the accused’s background, his conditions of life, his family situation. My guess is that few reading these words would choose those circumstances—whatever they might be. I know I certainly wouldn’t.
However, it’s all too easy to make “poor parenting” the scapegoat for street violence, as some seem to do. No doubt such parenting might sometimes be a factor. But if so, what’s behind “poor parenting”?
One element might well be the utterly inadequate minimum wage forcing some moms and dads, if employed at all, to work multiple jobs, entailing long hours away from home. In any case, such parenting is just one factor creating our nation’s climate of violence. Other factors, often more potent, include:
- Drug consumption and the drug economy, in which drug lords and their protectors in high places take the lion’s share of profits, leaving crumbs for the small fry menacing our streets.
- Paramilitarized law enforcement agencies suffering from poor accountability. These can make minority neighborhoods like ours sometimes seem like occupied territory.
- The Jim Crow legal and penal system with its spurious “war on drugs” designed to disempower and keep the “lower orders” in line. That bloated system breaks up families and fosters criminality, alienating from society those caught in its grip.
- The National Rifle Association and the small-arms manufacturers, doing their utmost to impede the rational regulation of devices designed to kill.
- And let us not forget the mainstream media that finds it easier to report on violence—“if it bleeds, it leads”—than to analyze and expose its social and economic causes. Too often, media normalizes violence and stokes the fear that, eroding community, fosters more violence.
