The "Irredeemable" Children

Posted by Darrell Dawsey Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:30 pm

32 Comments • Trackback (0) • Detroit, Michigan, Urban Affairs, crime , children, Highland Park, schools

At what point does any young man or woman become "beyond saving?" At what point does a society decide to give up? And at what point, if ever, can you possibly decide that that child deserves to die -- by your hand?

If early reports can be believed, a 37-year-old Highland Park man apparently came to this tragic conclusion about his own 15-year-old son Monday afternoon, when he walked the boy naked into a vacant lot and shot him execution-style in the back of the head.

When I first read the news, I shuddered and turned from my computer. Then I began railing to the Wife about the depths that people in this town are sinking to. Then, long hours later, I began to realize that, in Detroit and many other big cities and small towns, this isn't really new or rare. Yes, a father turning a gun on his child is unspeakable and, thankfully, still uncommon. But not unlike that Highland Park man, we declare children unsalvageable all the time. We may not kill them, but we certainly do walk them out of our schools, out of our homes, out of our lives, and we cut them loose, declaring them no longer fit to be focal points of our social resources or human effort or societal concern. "We can't save them all," we declare. And these days, that seems truer, and sadder, than ever.

Talk to a good public-school teacher in this town, or a good cop or social worker, and you'll eventually hear them speak about the conditions facing some of the worst-off of our children, how insurmountable the challenges can often be to even the "good" kids. These professionals know they are going to lose a good number of the children they try to work with, to violence, to drugs, to hellholes meant to pass for family homes. They know some children simply cannot or will not be redeemed. They don't say this with any measure of satisfaction or happiness either, but with a weariness and resignation offset only by their continued determination to "save those we can."

Yes, I think we can do more, in Detroit, in Michigan and in America. We can pump more money into our school systems and root out forces that hamper those systems' abilities to serve our children. We can enact more policies that will stimulate growth, to enable working parents to better care for their kids. We can create and join more social programs aimed at tutoring, mentoring and otherwise working to shield young people from the kudzu-like creep of bloodshed and bad influences.

But the painful truth is,"we can't save them all."

There are those whom we will not be able to turn into productive citizens, whom we cannot rescue, whom we will throw up our hands over and declare irredeemable. We're dealing with this very issue in Michigan now as we debate questions like how long we should jail young criminals. And in a place where resources are scarce and growing ever scarcer, how can you reasonably tell those tasked with using those resources to educate and protect your children that they have to also expend them on young men and women who would as likely shoot you as look at you? Who think school a waste? Who are already hardened veterans of the city's violent dope trade?

You save whom you can always, be they knuckleheads or prodigies. I know plenty of people who have become incredible adults after struggling through wayward childhoods.

Even so, how can stressed, overburdened institutions like our schools and youth centers and social-services networks not avoid having to cut their losses?

And please don't think I'm accusing Detroit or other cities of "cutting losses" in the way that the father from Highland Park allegedly disposed of his boy. What that man is accused of doing is as savage and inexcusable as it is shocking and perplexing. I don't know -- or care -- what "reason" he might offer for why his own flesh and blood was, to him, no longer worth allowing to live a moment more. However you slice it, if he killed his son, he's a monster.

But the rest of us also give up on kids in our own ways -- and, again, may not always have another choice. Perhaps our communities don't move as fast as he did. And perhaps we don't act with the same level of sick, inhumane violence. But like that man, we eventually do look at some of our children, turn them from our institutions and decide that they aren't worth -- or that we can't afford -- the effort anymore.

And in our own way, we leave them to whatever may come, death included.

A father who'd do that is clearly wrong. But what of the rest of us?