Part Three of a Continuing Series

Negative culture inflicting psychological devastation on fragile minds and self-image of the young

by Kevin J. Walker

When attempting to solve the problems of the community by targeting four block sections for intensive treatment, we must address the problems of health in both the physical and mental areas.

The stress levels, threats of interpersonal violence, constant noise, merged households where people are packed on top of each other and combining their own problems, which are impressed onto the children creates environments that blast apart the minds of many, and lay the groundwork for the news reports of encroaching violence that affects many neighborhoods.

The stated solutions of the Walker Grid+4 Plan for retaking the community block by block specifically addresses health care, by reorienting city, county, federal and private health and counseling efforts onto the selected four block zones, while concurrent with the full court press of law enforcement, super insulating homes and wiring them for fast internet access, and closing off alleyways from usage by crooks and others with clandestine agendas.

The approximately one third of the African Descended community that has a dysfunctional mindset forged in a persistent multigenerational culture of poverty presents special problems, but without such a concentrated effort first the community then the city at large will continue an inevitable slow but steady decline.

Unproductive undisciplined people with mores that run counter to positive living with others, employment, child raising and education will drag any area they inhabit downwards, and must be arrested without further delay.

Milwaukee is filling up with such low class people, and cannot survive very much longer as a viable place to live, work and play unless their negative influence is diminished. The walker Grid Plan has been crafted to do just that.

• “Health Care Operatives will provide screenings, consultation, nutrition, and physical activity guides to engage in preventative measures against Hypertension, Obesity, and Diabetes to uphold the health of the inhabitants who would receive contraception and/or Well-Baby and WIC services;”

• ‘ATODA Teams Address Drug Dependencies of adults and expedite their enrollment in drug treatment programs, to alleviate persistent personal problems that add to community strife;”

• “Psychological and Mental Health Care professionals will flood the area and teach the pre-screened and referred inhabitants how to manage their negative impulses such as Anger Management; learning how to realize what is and is not a positive and nurturing relationship; how to stay on good terms with the other parent of their child and so forth;”

• “Community Based and Faith-Based Institutions will engage in demonstrating how to raise their children properly and with discipline so as to avoid problems later in life; a network of block clubs and Block Captains would be established to make sure the area doesn’t backslide;”

Life of COP Not Guided By Logic and Reason

The Culture of Poverty is an illogical mindset shared by those who were reared up outside of the Middle Class philosophy of weighing consequences, of always looking forward, involvement and investing in the normal working economy, and the Traditional Nuclear Family structure.

The COP has evolved into a highly dysfunctional frame of mind that locks its victims out of the normal above-ground economy and into a system of multigenerational cyclic poverty that is eating away at the fabric of our communities. The “Logical Disconnect” is a consequence of being outside of society’s interconnecting web of reality, consequences, of one’s choices, and checks and balances. In the normal world, good choices are rewarded, bad ones aren’t. Illogical consequences are definitely not rewarded.

But in their world, logic was turned on its head. And this was all fine until inescapable Term-Limited Welfare Reform was instituted, and the formerly insulated members of the Culture of Poverty were dragged kicking and screaming into the light of a new day.

The problem of the Logical Disconnect is real, where there are generations of adults who have not had the constant daily Middle Class approach to the world where weighing the consequences for actions is a constant in their lives, which builds self-reliance, trust and faith in one’s abilities to handle whatever life throws at you.

The problem and the trap of multigenerational family poverty is that the affected population was insulated from reality for decades under the smothering cocoon of welfare.

The thrusting out into the world of work and doing for self under the welfare reform of AFDC was like teaching kids to swim by tossing them into the deep end of a swimming pool. It was a shock to their systems.

The results were much the same: some swim well on their own, some will need some help for a while, but unfortunately, some will sink. “Job Ready” was the category that had some in “Wisconsin Works” or W-2 sinking.

The problem of first-time new mothers and the amount of time they need before reassuming work, as well as dependable child care for when they enter the job market must be addressed.

The discussion must include expansion of meaningful counseling and educational options so we can interrupt the trans-generational engines of the Culture of Poverty and its evil spawn, a Culture of Death that is destroying our communities.

Scenes From the City’s Streets Show the Ongoing Mental Destruction of the Young: A woman’s children by another man or men were discovered being abused by her live-in boyfriend, who was someone she met while she was out one night and moved him into her household after only knowing him two weeks.

Her infant son suffered broken ribs, bruising, internal bleeding, ruptured organs and other injuries obviously inflicted over time, all happening while her new beau was “watching the kids” while she worked. The prosecutor with the District Attorney’s office asked her if she’d won the lottery, would she trust her new boyfriend to watch $2,000 she’d won?

“Hell No!!”

Then he asked her, why on earth should she trust him with her children, something that was infinitely more precious to her, or at least should be?

"Bring yo’ lil’ Black ass on! You make me sick, walkin’ so slow alla time! Shoot!...”

The youngish mother said this to her little boy, while his tiny legs are working to keep up with her strides while she was walking far ahead of him, like the way people do when they really don’t want you around but they have to stay with you. She’d said as much just before.

“You make me wish I’d never had you!”

On Martin Luther King Drive, a grandmother or auntie has had it up to here with the incessant questions of what appears to be an 8-year-old boy.

“I done tol’ you, she ain’t coming home until the White folks let her out! And you headin’ to the same place!”

He’s in what Africentric educator Jawanza Kunjufu called the Defiant Stance. Fists curled up, lips pursed, and shoulders squared as he beats back the emotions and bottles it up. Again. He won’t let the tears flow. He won’t let them see him cry. But it surely will come back out someday, later on in life when he’s a worker, a lover, or father. And that’s when those now little fists and repressed anger will find a purpose, and perhaps a target.

Another Future Bum, or “Old Playa?”

Or maybe not. Maybe he’ll keep it bottled inside, letting his self-esteem fall further and never rise. Then he’ll be eligible to join the ranks of the Old Playas, the sad burnouts who wasted their lives away on booze and drugs. After all, they have to come from somewhere. They were all little boys and girls once, all with the same potential.

“Yo’ no-good Daddy ain’t nuthin’, and YOU ain’t goin’ to be nothin’ neither. Just you watch. I’m right!”

It’s not unusual to see and hear those sad scenes and the pain on the faces of the little children as their mothers, the Goddesses of their little universes, tell them they are hated, despised and worthless; preordained failures who are wasting their time trying to be anything but. And if they could be un-made it would be done. Just in the world and in the way.

Every summer there are reports of mothers who let their children’s brains get cooked by leaving them inside hot parked cars with the windows rolled up while on a tryst or midday drinking binge. There is therefore nothing special about dysfunctional mothers in the COP when it comes to child neglect and/or abuse, just more prevalence because of the environment there that devalues all life and with it those of the precious young while their mothers pursue their self-oriented agenda.

Health care has long been a concern by those active in the Inner and Central cities, as it should. But there are unseen maladies that need to be addressed for any long-term success oriented plan for improving neighborhoods. Any attempted solution to the problems of the community must take mental health measures into account. Many of the mental scars are being taken into another generation, with ill-raised children becoming ill-prepared parents themselves, and laying the groundwork for another dysfunctional generation.

• Mental health professionals and counselors in the schools and at neighborhood centers will have to employ creative and innovative methods to address these subjects.

The classical methods of making appointments to come in for talks isn’t likely to fly very well. It could in the arena of sports or other competitive events, or trips that are in reality retreats, such as the weekend long trips by Career Youth Development at Green Lake; the Spirit of the Men Workshop; or the Father-Son Camp TJ Peace Weekends in Western Wisconsin’s Blackhawk Recreation area along the Mississippi River the weekend after Labour Day.

In these faraway environs we found that after a few hours away from the city even street hardened boys opened up, and spoke of their hopes and fears for the future to attentive and nonjudgmental men. Despite the faux swagger and bravado, they were really just kids, and didn’t want to have to be “hard.” They wanted to live good lives as anyone does.

They actually enjoyed all those corny camp games, ghost stories by the fire, cooking marshmallows, the night walks, astronomy talks and riding horses. In other words, all the things they couldn’t do back in the city!

If real mental health care professionals instead of youth counselors could be brought into these or other situations a lot more good could be accomplished. Within the four block zones of the Grid Plan different arrangements would have to be employed but that’s where creativity comes in.

• Faith Based Initiatives Have Been Found to Be Effective where traditional interventions have not. No matter the debates also about separation of church and state, we must be guided by the Black mother who stated at the 1993 Empower America summit that was kicked off in Milwaukee:

“I’m not afraid somebody’s going to pray over my child, I’m more afraid somebody’s going to shoot him.”

The new push for “Faith Based” programs being helmed by churches instead of just the government or nonprofit community-based agencies is being implemented. This has upset the system because the churches engaging in the new allocations are Conservatively oriented, with a values agenda that is set against such things as abortion and empowering those in the Sodomite community, who have inflamed and activated these former Civil Rights activists by attempting to link their struggle for group rights such as Gay Marriage. The push against being overwhelmed by a generational wave of those in the Culture of Poverty might yet be spearheaded by the historical leaders of the community once again who broke the chains of Jim Crow post Enslavement suppression.

Has it not been written that we will reap what we have sown? Well, the seeds of another generation of those in the Culture of Poverty have already been sown and the crop is a bitter harvest. A young population as a result of the high teen birthrate of the 1980s as well as their children are now with us, and for much of the next 20 years these children will live in poverty, or as part of the crime ridden, drug financed, murderous Underground Economy.

The current debate about whether Evolution is fact or theory may be debatable, but that there is a Devolution, or a breakdown of values affecting children in the Culture of Poverty isn’t arguable. Indeed, the fact is that conditions are getting worse for those segments of the population caught up in a dysfunctional mindset transcending generations that encourages anti-social anti-family behaviour, and triggered the massive shifts toward welfare reform and the investments in the Prison Industrial Complex for its more incorrigible and dangerous elements.

Children are now seen as the key to breaking the stifling cycle of poverty, if they can be gotten to soon enough. This may be difficult considering the sea of volatility, sexuality, and unreality they are immersed in, and the low quality of people who surround them and who are a constant assault on their self-esteem and any upward aspirations they may have.

Yet the fate of the children in the Culture of Poverty is of paramount import, for in order to break the multigenerational cycle logic dictates we must interdict the pernicious process that sucks in the young. Again, this will not be easy, and may not bear much fruit for another generation, especially looking at what they have for role models and society’s growing reluctance to pump more monies into sinkholes of programs with little effect.

The mindset of the children of the Culture of Poverty ensures that we will grapple with the problem of their dysfunctional thinking well into another generation, or most of two decades at least, and that is if we are fortunate. No matter what programs we have in place, nor what we do, a full generation of children will still have to go through grinding poverty because of the bad choices their parents and society has made for them until things start to be finally solved.

COP children get their self-esteem beat down early in life from so-called mothers unworthy of the title; to their biological baby-making daddies; from a parade of three month males through their households; and from the brutal boyfriends whom they see physically or emotionally mistreat their mothers, aunties and sisters on an almost daily basis.

Some of the residents may benefit more from the spiritual realm workers than the secular. Whatever works.

• Dieticians and nutritionists should be deployed to treat the growing epidemic of overweight and just plain fat kids.

walkerworld_2000@yahoo.com

website: http://thewordnetpaper.tripod.com