Finding the gifts within
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a firm believer that every child has a gift.
“The key to fulfillment in life is finding it,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald told a standing-room-only crowd at Spokane’s First Presbyterian Church on Wednesday.
Pitts, 47, found his gift in words and “making them do what I wanted them to.” But he could not have realized his dream, he said, without the encouragement of his mother, his church and his community. They invested in him, and he owed it to them to be all that he could be.
The City Forum lecture series strives to bring speakers to Spokane who can lead us to a better understanding of what makes for a good city.
For Pitts, the more fundamental question is what makes a good human.
The answer to both questions may be found in the real-life parable of a young man named Jermaine Barnes, the subject of a 2000 Miami Herald story by writer Fabiola Santiago and a subsequent column by Pitts.
“Reared in poverty by a single mother. Trouble-prone, sullen and sometimes violent. Shipped off to a last-chance school for bad kids,” Pitts wrote. “Jermaine was so difficult that his new teachers were given a two-word warning: ‘He’s hell.’ “
Until one day, Jermaine’s teacher handed him a magazine picture of flowers and asked him to paint it.
“He handed in a canvas bursting with fragile beauty,” Pitts said Wednesday. “It turned out Jermaine Barnes was an artist.”
His teacher nurtured him, gave him purpose and set him on a course to make money from his paintings to supplement his mother’s income from Burger King. Without this teacher, Pitts said, Jermaine’s life might have turned out differently. He might have even died.
“There are few things sadder than dying without becoming what you might have been,” Pitts said.
But look what we have dumped on our schools, he said – not only the responsibility for a basic education, but for teaching character, as well.
Black children, 70 percent of whom grow up without the steadying influence of a father, are particularly vulnerable to the message of pop culture, Pitts said.
Electronic media deliver a message in opposition to the lessons we must learn in life.
“It is a culture on the make,” he said, validating the worst impulses of human nature.
But pop culture, with its message of wantonness and violence, “is created not to lead a child astray, but to the cash register.”
The entertainment media does not create the national mood, but reflects it, Pitts said. Curbing media is not a national panacea for what ails us. “That is a simple argument and therefore an attractive one,” he said.
“We blame Batman, but it isn’t Batman who is too busy watching the game to teach character,” Pitts said. “It isn’t Batman who overcrowds our schools.”
What is the switch that is never thrown, the connection that is never made? Pitts asked. Who looks out for our children? How does a virtual community look out for our kids?
Too many parents have abdicated their responsibility, content to be “a buddy” to their children, Pitts said.
Psychologists tell us not to blame children; blame only destroys esteem. No doubt some children value themselves too little, he said, but others value themselves too much.
“We used to call this being spoiled.”
Pitts bemoaned the lack of conscience that led to the school shootings of the 1990s, but he said it is not the entertainment media we must look to for societal change.
Our kids won’t get any closer to Marilyn Manson or Kobe Bryant than the CD in the boombox or the poster on the wall.
“The question is not what about them,” Pitts said. “The question is what about us?”
We have become so addicted to our convenience that we forget raising a child is not always convenient, Pitts said.
“Being a parent is difficult with no guarantee of success even we do it right.”
When Pitts despairs of this, he thinks of Jermaine Barnes and the teacher who found the gift in the child who was hell.
“Who would have thought that there were flowers growing in hell?”