"For what its worth, Dante Jackson Freeman was the toughest kid in Philadelphia. Ever.
Four years ago, in a craps game in his North Philadelphia neighborhood up around 29th and Oxford Streets, he won what some apparently felt was too much. At least that's his mother's theory of how his trouble started. Stacey Jackson wasn't always sure what was going on with her teenage son in those streets. She was relaxing at a neighborhood club on a winter night when she was told her son was outside. She found Dante, furious, standing on the cold sidewalk in his socks.
"Can you believe this?" he asked her. He had been jumped by some boys he knew, and they had taken his jacket and his boots.
"He felt violated," Stacey said. "People he knew did it to him. After that, Dante just went off."
Another Dante conjured up one stunning vision of hell, but there is another real one burning in fierce pockets around this city. African Americans here are three times more likely to be murdered than the countrywide average. Most of the victims are young men. There were 317 gun-related homicides here last year, compared with 233 four years ago, despite world-class emergency medical care that every year pulls more and more back from the grave. The trend reflects an out-of-control urban underclass, an abandoned and shockingly vicious subculture that is one of the biggest ongoing stories in this city and country.
Yet these are rarely the kinds of killings that get much press. The carnage in the streets of American cities in any one year far exceeds the combined death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet it is not even on the agenda of national politics. More and more, the shootings are not about money or drugs, but about nothing at all, or what amounts to nothing in the larger world. Today's murders are often about being "dissed." The reckless pride of a teenage boy is not new, but what of a society without the constraints of family and community? That amplifies petty vendettas with easy access to deadly weapons? That encourages it in film and song? There is something new about that.
So Dante's story began with stolen boots. To his mother, he was not perfect, but was basically "a good boy," polite and caring, a dropout just a few credits shy of his high school diploma. To the system, he just fit a familiar mold - an angry young man with prior drug and handgun arrests in a willing swan dive toward death or prison.
Three weeks after his boots were stolen, Dante was shot for the first time. The round hit his lower left leg and foot. He was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital, where they stitched him up expertly and sent him home on crutches, his leg in a cast. That lasted for a few weeks. As soon as the leg would bear weight, he cut off the cast and went back out with his gun.
He was shot the second time just a few weeks later, in the other leg. This time he was repaired at Temple University Hospital, where Dante was to become a regular. He was sent home once more in a cast, and after a few weeks he cut that one off and went back out with his gun, where he was promptly shot a third time. That round went into his side in the front and exited in the rear. No organ damage. They stitched him up in the emergency room at Temple and sent him back home.
"Dante, he was a quick healer," Stacey said. He wasn't down for long.
The fourth time was more serious. On April 14, 2005, he was hit multiple times - "four or five," Stacey said - in the chest and stomach. He was with his friend Pierre "Scooter" Gatson, who died. At Temple's trauma center, where he was now on a first-name basis, 19-year-old Dante had a hole poked in his neck to attach a breathing machine, and surgeons sewed up his innards, which had been savagely rearranged. They cut out a damaged portion of his bowels. He spent 30 days in intensive care.
"He was a wiry, angry kid," said James Curtis, a trauma nurse who got to know him during that visit. "I could relate to him. I grew up in a neighborhood like that. I gave him the talk, the one about putting the guns down, finding a job. They are a captive audience for a while. You hope that the shock of the shooting will open their ears. I give them hard words. Some of them listen. I've had kids who have taken it upon themselves to change. But for some of them, that world is all they know."
Scott Charles, the trauma outreach coordinator at Temple, tells a scarred kid like Dante that getting shot is not like getting hit by lightning; that, hit once, he is more likely to be shot again; that unless he makes big changes, he will probably be back, or dead. He points out that the surgeons and nurses are all making a nice living patching him up repeatedly, that they drive cool cars back and forth to lovely homes on safe blocks. He speaks up for education, responsibility and hard work.
Dante was a polite listener, but unmoved. He knew, but would never say, who shot him. He was annoyed when the women in his family sniffled at his bedside over his terrible wounds.
"You stop all that cryin'," he scolded them. "But when I do die, I want you all to get tattoos."
Dante went home that summer with a colostomy bag. The surgeons left a hole in his abdomen so that the large intestine could drain feces into it. It wasn't permanent. When the healing progressed, they planned to reattach the severed portions and get rid of the bag, but Dante didn't last that long. He had lost a lot of weight, so under his oversized shirt you couldn't see the bag... or the gun. He was hit for the last time on Aug. 18, 2005, in a gangland-style shoot-out with a passing car, which sped away. Stacey found him still on the pavement, silent, his breath coming in heaves, wounded this time in the neck and back.
There are still many, many tough kids in Philadelphia, armed and angry and ready, but I think Dante gets the crown. The old ghetto joke is: If you want to look tough, have a broken arm. So it should come as no surprise that on his fifth delivery to a trauma center, the toughest kid in Philadelphia was dead.
He is buried in an unmarked grave in his old neighborhood. Stacey is planning to get a stone in time for the first anniversary of his death. The girls in the family have tattoos. "
I would like to thank Mark Bowden from my hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, for that moving and all too familiar story.
Memo to my white liberal progressive friends at blogs like My DD,Huffington Post, and Daily Kos: Dante Jackson and many more like him, is the reason we can't go into this raging cultural and political war together. The truth is, there are no Dante Jackson's in your world or in your neighborhoods. And although there might not be any Dante Jackson's in my neighborhood either, Dante looks just like me, and we share something that none of you ever will; our race. The blood that ran through Dante's veins is the same blood that runs through mine, and more than likely, the person's that killed him. It's what separates me from all of my progressive friends who might share some of my politics, but know nothing about my struggle.
When I wake up every day and have to read about yet another young black man taking the life of another it hurts. And it pains me that a country that can spend billions of dollars to protect the life of people thousands and thousands of miles away can't protect the children right here in Philadelphia. It pains me to watch poli-tricksters posture with bulls**t issues (Troop surge no troop surge,non-binding resolutions,binding resolutions, and on and on) when kids are dying out here on these streets, and neighborhoods are being lost . Why? Because it's not their kids, and the kids that are dying do not look like them. " Field, why are you so angry all the time?" Because America and the ignorant ass selfish people running it made me this way.
Oh well, happy President's Day everybody. Hey, just one more day to be happy for. I bet there will be some great sales in the stores. They even say it's the best day to buy a car. Thank God our 43rd President, the frat boy, is fighting for us over in Iraq. How else could we afford to keep the price of oil down. After all, what good is a shiny new car if you can't afford to gas it.
Four years ago, in a craps game in his North Philadelphia neighborhood up around 29th and Oxford Streets, he won what some apparently felt was too much. At least that's his mother's theory of how his trouble started. Stacey Jackson wasn't always sure what was going on with her teenage son in those streets. She was relaxing at a neighborhood club on a winter night when she was told her son was outside. She found Dante, furious, standing on the cold sidewalk in his socks.
"Can you believe this?" he asked her. He had been jumped by some boys he knew, and they had taken his jacket and his boots.
"He felt violated," Stacey said. "People he knew did it to him. After that, Dante just went off."
Another Dante conjured up one stunning vision of hell, but there is another real one burning in fierce pockets around this city. African Americans here are three times more likely to be murdered than the countrywide average. Most of the victims are young men. There were 317 gun-related homicides here last year, compared with 233 four years ago, despite world-class emergency medical care that every year pulls more and more back from the grave. The trend reflects an out-of-control urban underclass, an abandoned and shockingly vicious subculture that is one of the biggest ongoing stories in this city and country.
Yet these are rarely the kinds of killings that get much press. The carnage in the streets of American cities in any one year far exceeds the combined death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet it is not even on the agenda of national politics. More and more, the shootings are not about money or drugs, but about nothing at all, or what amounts to nothing in the larger world. Today's murders are often about being "dissed." The reckless pride of a teenage boy is not new, but what of a society without the constraints of family and community? That amplifies petty vendettas with easy access to deadly weapons? That encourages it in film and song? There is something new about that.
So Dante's story began with stolen boots. To his mother, he was not perfect, but was basically "a good boy," polite and caring, a dropout just a few credits shy of his high school diploma. To the system, he just fit a familiar mold - an angry young man with prior drug and handgun arrests in a willing swan dive toward death or prison.
Three weeks after his boots were stolen, Dante was shot for the first time. The round hit his lower left leg and foot. He was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital, where they stitched him up expertly and sent him home on crutches, his leg in a cast. That lasted for a few weeks. As soon as the leg would bear weight, he cut off the cast and went back out with his gun.
He was shot the second time just a few weeks later, in the other leg. This time he was repaired at Temple University Hospital, where Dante was to become a regular. He was sent home once more in a cast, and after a few weeks he cut that one off and went back out with his gun, where he was promptly shot a third time. That round went into his side in the front and exited in the rear. No organ damage. They stitched him up in the emergency room at Temple and sent him back home.
"Dante, he was a quick healer," Stacey said. He wasn't down for long.
The fourth time was more serious. On April 14, 2005, he was hit multiple times - "four or five," Stacey said - in the chest and stomach. He was with his friend Pierre "Scooter" Gatson, who died. At Temple's trauma center, where he was now on a first-name basis, 19-year-old Dante had a hole poked in his neck to attach a breathing machine, and surgeons sewed up his innards, which had been savagely rearranged. They cut out a damaged portion of his bowels. He spent 30 days in intensive care.
"He was a wiry, angry kid," said James Curtis, a trauma nurse who got to know him during that visit. "I could relate to him. I grew up in a neighborhood like that. I gave him the talk, the one about putting the guns down, finding a job. They are a captive audience for a while. You hope that the shock of the shooting will open their ears. I give them hard words. Some of them listen. I've had kids who have taken it upon themselves to change. But for some of them, that world is all they know."
Scott Charles, the trauma outreach coordinator at Temple, tells a scarred kid like Dante that getting shot is not like getting hit by lightning; that, hit once, he is more likely to be shot again; that unless he makes big changes, he will probably be back, or dead. He points out that the surgeons and nurses are all making a nice living patching him up repeatedly, that they drive cool cars back and forth to lovely homes on safe blocks. He speaks up for education, responsibility and hard work.
Dante was a polite listener, but unmoved. He knew, but would never say, who shot him. He was annoyed when the women in his family sniffled at his bedside over his terrible wounds.
"You stop all that cryin'," he scolded them. "But when I do die, I want you all to get tattoos."
Dante went home that summer with a colostomy bag. The surgeons left a hole in his abdomen so that the large intestine could drain feces into it. It wasn't permanent. When the healing progressed, they planned to reattach the severed portions and get rid of the bag, but Dante didn't last that long. He had lost a lot of weight, so under his oversized shirt you couldn't see the bag... or the gun. He was hit for the last time on Aug. 18, 2005, in a gangland-style shoot-out with a passing car, which sped away. Stacey found him still on the pavement, silent, his breath coming in heaves, wounded this time in the neck and back.
There are still many, many tough kids in Philadelphia, armed and angry and ready, but I think Dante gets the crown. The old ghetto joke is: If you want to look tough, have a broken arm. So it should come as no surprise that on his fifth delivery to a trauma center, the toughest kid in Philadelphia was dead.
He is buried in an unmarked grave in his old neighborhood. Stacey is planning to get a stone in time for the first anniversary of his death. The girls in the family have tattoos. "
I would like to thank Mark Bowden from my hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, for that moving and all too familiar story.
Memo to my white liberal progressive friends at blogs like My DD,Huffington Post, and Daily Kos: Dante Jackson and many more like him, is the reason we can't go into this raging cultural and political war together. The truth is, there are no Dante Jackson's in your world or in your neighborhoods. And although there might not be any Dante Jackson's in my neighborhood either, Dante looks just like me, and we share something that none of you ever will; our race. The blood that ran through Dante's veins is the same blood that runs through mine, and more than likely, the person's that killed him. It's what separates me from all of my progressive friends who might share some of my politics, but know nothing about my struggle.
When I wake up every day and have to read about yet another young black man taking the life of another it hurts. And it pains me that a country that can spend billions of dollars to protect the life of people thousands and thousands of miles away can't protect the children right here in Philadelphia. It pains me to watch poli-tricksters posture with bulls**t issues (Troop surge no troop surge,non-binding resolutions,binding resolutions, and on and on) when kids are dying out here on these streets, and neighborhoods are being lost . Why? Because it's not their kids, and the kids that are dying do not look like them. " Field, why are you so angry all the time?" Because America and the ignorant ass selfish people running it made me this way.
Oh well, happy President's Day everybody. Hey, just one more day to be happy for. I bet there will be some great sales in the stores. They even say it's the best day to buy a car. Thank God our 43rd President, the frat boy, is fighting for us over in Iraq. How else could we afford to keep the price of oil down. After all, what good is a shiny new car if you can't afford to gas it.
