Building Hope In The Face Of Anger

Perhaps you remember “What’s Going On,” the turning-point 1971 album by Marvin Gaye. It’s less a record than a place, a soundscape of lush, diaphanous grace where voices drift past, brushing against each other with aching delicacy. Songs of social commentary making observations that discomfit, asking questions that bruise.

“Save the Children” was the one that always left me the most uneasy. The song was desperation and lament, the spillage of an overfilled heart.

“When I look at the world,” sang Marvin, “it fills me with sorrow. Little children today, really gonna suffer tomorrow.”

Then, voice rising, he pleaded: “Save the children. Save the babies.”

I always wondered how.

So many children. So much need. … How?

The question comes back to me as I study the current Newsweek, whose cover reminds me that the children have come of age. They were never saved. And they are angry.

“The new generation gap,” the magazine calls it, aptly describing the rift between middle-class blacks who grew up in the glow of civil rights years and their progeny, the angry hip-hoppers who have come of age in the aftermath of dreams. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but in our village, the elders and the young ones seem to have less to say to each other - and fewer ways to say it - with each passing day.

The difference between then and now, a 26-year-old woman tells us, is that “then they had hope.”

Now, it seems, so many of the children are hopeless. As in, without hope. Because they’ve been left with what? Disillusion and detritus. And from that, they have fashioned angry music, an angry walk, angry laughter … a hundred ways of anger. It is cold in the aftermath of dreams.

The truth that drops like thunder is this: While the anger is, in part, just the young being young, it also reflects that admonition we, their elders, failed to heed.

“Save the children.”

We never figured that one out. Instead, those of us who could, saved ourselves. We disconnected, taking with us the things we knew, the values we held. Began to walk the other way when we saw the children coming with their angry scowls, strange music and funny-looking hair.

As if we didn’t seem just as alien to our elders once. Only, they embraced us anyway, didn’t they?

Yet, we left our children skating the rim of apocalypse - the meltdown of families, cities, safe places. We left them alone. Learned to roll up our windows, avert our eyes and drive right past bombed-out lots and shuttered storefronts.

If the children who played in those places came up with stunted values and deformed aspirations, what else did we expect? We should know from our own lives that agony untended doesn’t simply vanish. It changes its shape like water, seeps through somehow.

So that a boy who grows up in hard places, who thinks himself a “nigger,” who believes himself limited to options of poverty or crime, learns to be proud of that because, after all, one needs to be proud of something. Even if it’s nothing.

And what do we do in response, those of us who seized integration’s promise? We talk. Worse, we talk mostly to one another. Talk and talk and talk some more, raising gaseous clouds of dialogue that don’t come close to solving anything. Because words alone can’t solve this, can’t close the gap or restore the hope.

We need to do something. Shut up and just do. Damn the funky excuses and just do.

Me, I got tired of saying “someday.” That’s why I finally became a Big Brother this week. My new little brother is a 9-year-old brown boy who has lost his parents to drugs and prison. A bright little boy with mischievous smiles and sly humor.

I’ve only been a Big Brother for a matter of days, but I already know this will be one of the very finest things I’ve ever done. Just as I also know it won’t be enough. Not nearly.

That both bothers me and does not. Because I’ve finally found the answer I was looking for all those years ago. I’m only embarrassed that it took me so long to grasp the obvious.

How do we save the children?

One at a time.

xxxx