Expecting to Be Dead

Ten teenage boys, 15-17, sit in a room with a Questscope facilitator. One simple question, “What do you expect to be doing in 5 years?”  Silence. “C’mon, what do you think about?” 

“We will be dead. No need to think.”

They are fatherless and motherless boys, found as babies on doorsteps of churches, mosques and social agencies. The family name on their identity cards reads, “unknown past and future.” Totally disinherited. Raised in institutions with rows of beds and rows of chairs to sit in to eat at rows of tables. Institutional parenting practices are also mostly rows of rigidity - just comply and no noise, please. 

But every weekend, there’s a break in that rigid system, an “off” day to be free – outside the rows and rows of the institution. And get some cash when you sell stuff, like socks and T-shirts, in a pop-up street market. Just hang out with some merch and hawk it. Couple of bucks a day, for a kid with a smooth pitch. Awesome, right? NOT.

They know the truth of their suffering, even when we do not. To get the T-shirts to sell, they have to let the supplier have sex with them. Simple. Deal. This informal system of hidden violence ensures that these boys are also sure life will be cut short for them. They live to be dead. The chance to grow into freedom will be wasted on them. They do not expect to be around long enough.

In the same year, we started a program for incarcerated youth, caught in a formal system of concealed violence. These were boys who goofed up and got arrested – for petty theft, for fistfights, for breaking windows, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These boys faced the same “simple deal” as the other boys we knew – submission to sexual exploitation by adults with power over them. 

There were thousands of these teen boys incarcerated every year. And 85% of them would be back for a second stint “inside” after being released. A textbook example of a violent cycle spinning like a hurricane through young lives. 

We took a professional gamble – that if each boy were paired with a mentor/role model, then he might imagine, “If he could succeed, I could too.” And the mentor could add the strength of relationship, “I will be with you through thick and thin.” And we would go to bat for the boys – improving hiring standards, better staff supervision and greater transparency in the day-to-day of correctional centers – to make the system fair and a bit safer. 

We also took a moral gamble – built on belief in the dignity and worth of a smelly street kid whose survival hinged on his proficiency in lying to be safe from adults who could not be trusted in systems of power. We discovered that when all of us took this moral/ethical gamble, we became better adults. With better ears. Bigger hearts. Clearer heads to see the traces of cycles of violence in people’s lives.

In each relationship with each mentor, a young person got a chance to sense life beyond how it is and get a clearer view of how life should be. Living to be alive, not just living to be dead.

We were totally amazed at the unexpected transformation in the mentors. A boy and his body should be the subject of what he wants to be, of his freedom to become – instead of being the object of what someone else wants to do to him. This insight and the empathy it created was a true gift to the mentors themselves, who moved towards their own freedom.

A university student mentor of an incarcerated kid told me that he no longer felt he needed to kill himself to kill others because of his anger at injustice. He became a person with an ear to the angel of his better nature, respecting the dignity of that kid and breaking the cycle of violence instead of increasing it. That student and I can live as neighbors in a world of compassion like that.

But violence always finds a way to get in our face. The violent tragedy of Gaza unfolds daily, right before our eyes. And that violence is now spreading beyond Gaza. 

Those young people in Gaza, the survivors of orchestrated, organized killing, are wondering daily why no one sees them, no one hears them, no one grasps the truth of their suffering – that they are objects of what someone else wants to do to them. The awful truth of an official system of unconcealed violence turned against them. With no one to acknowledge their dignity, their right to be free to live. No one who will say, stop.

A fatherless boy faces an informal system of hidden violence. 

An incarcerated boy faces a formal system of concealed violence.

Two million Palestinians in Gaza face a military system of unconcealed violence.

Violence threatens not only them, but all of us. It will spawn consequences that will be costly for us all. 

We need to take a moral gamble. To stop believing those who kill and then float words to our ears to block the words of those who suffer. Vengeful words of killers are not true – they will not bring life to our world. Words of those suffering are true – they can bring life to the world if we can listen. We need to start believing that the people being killed are people like us, people with kids and car payments once, mothers and mortgages. Who once had a life we could recognize. And now have a death from which we avert our eyes. 

Our challenge is that violence is both visible and invisible. Violence comes cloaked in words that cannot deceive us if we do not want to be deceived.

We can see starving people. We can see bombed people. We can see babies crying without arms. We can see people who know the truth of their suffering even when we do not. We see real violent things that happen to real people in real time. We can grow in compassion, OR we can be deceived into believing “they” deserve it. But this can happen only if we want to be deceived. 

Seriously, we cannot, the world cannot, afford to grow hard hearts, hearts that want to be deceived. Remember, any one of us human beings could be pushed into a deadly corner with no escape, one day.

Let’s go for life as our long game, a game of hope for the future, not the short game of death in the present.