PERSPECTIVE ON YOUTH : ‘Waiting to Die or Get Locked Up’ : Gangbanging is the urban poor’s version of teen-age suicide. Yet we have no intention of helping these kids.

Beyond the numbers, which tell us that gang membership and violence are on the rise, there is something else happening on the inner-city streets of Los Angeles. Lines are being crossed all the time. Clearly demarcated codes of behavior among gangs, heretofore respected and honored, are ignored.

In my neighborhood, where eight gangs control an area not much larger than a postage stamp on a Thomas Bros. map page, local schools have been caught in gang crossfire several times. The emergency room waiting area of our nearby hospital has been riddled with gunfire. Houses, filled with mothers and fathers and siblings of gang members, are regularly “blasted” at night.

The first reaction to this ever-accelerating crossing of lines is likely to be outrage, but outrage rarely leads us to solutions. It seems to me that our task is to interpret this current disregard of a time-honored protocol among gangs. If we wish to address this problem, we must first ask, “Why is this happening?”

When a child is in pain and “acts out,” we would never think of allowing our outrage at the child’s behavior to dictate our response. Thinking adults know that such actions, self-destructive or violent, are telling us something. Psychology 101 leads us to look beyond the “acting out” and ask, “Where is this coming from?” We should proceed no differently with gangs.

Gangs have upped the ante in their costly and senseless battle over turf for discernible reasons. Primary among these is that their despair has grown so deep. Their inability to imagine a future beyond the housing projects, the poverty and their gang allegiance reduces the chance that they will care enough not to kill or remove themselves from harm’s way. “I’m only waiting to die or get locked up,” Li’l Flaco confides to me, with tears. In the course of one week, no less than five gang members articulated much the same message to me. This is the most common expression of a future that gang members can conjure up. Gangbanging, in fact, has become the urban poor’s version of teen-age suicide.

So complex are all the ingredients that cause gang membership, that it seems virtually impossible to isolate one solution that can address them all and thereby manufacture a hope for the future upon which these kids can rely. Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

After a talk I gave recently, a very wealthy doctor asked, “How can I help?” I told him, “Jobs, money, jobs and money.” He brushed this aside with, “Yeah, I know, but what besides that can I do?” as if to say, “How can I help without really helping?”

Somewhat facetiously, I answered his question with a question, “Did I mention jobs and money?” As a society, we seem hellbent on focusing our efforts on everything but solutions that work. We’re looking for the easy fix. We are far more willing to commit our resources to warehousing gang youth in detention facilities rather than employ them. We can work ourselves into a dither devising ordinances that keep gangs out of public parks and expend not a whit keeping gang members working. What my postage stamp-sized community couldn’t do with one-eighth of the money of Christo’s umbrellas and with a large dose of jobs.

In my barrio, jobs work and money saves lives. When I have had the funds to place a gang member on a job site and pay his salary, I’ve seen him stop banging. When, on the rarest of occasions, an employer has offered a job to one of these youth, I’ve witnessed kids suddenly have a reason to get up in the morning. Jobs fill them with a sense of purpose, pride and dignity. As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs.

Beyond the dismay we register at the “crossing of lines” and the horror we express with each new day’s revelation of senseless gang violence lies a sad and painful truth. We lack the will to do anything. We sequester ourselves in attitudes that continue to “monsterize” these youth. We would seek not to understand this latest wave of unimaginable acts but rather, set about to crush and eradicate the perpetrators. We have no intention of assisting these kids and so we content ourselves with a helpless abhorence that further neglects and alienates them. Lines, I fear, will continue to be crossed until we commit ourselves to meet the despondency of urban youth with the bright hope of employment. Until that happens, nothing will change.