…Still Waiting for Superman.

Until then everyone else is the bogeyman. We have become a culture of accountability: that is, holding everyone ELSE accountable. It’s the bad teachers. It’s the uninvolved parents. It’s the self-involved youth. It’s the video games. It’s the media. If we can determine the right place to affix blame, then we don’t have to do anything about the problem ourselves.  So, the fingers point every direction but inward. 

The caller to the radio talk show suggests that we make a portion of each student’s grades dependent upon the parent’s participation in his school (attendance at parent/teacher conferences, etc.) The host thinks this is a great idea. I’m thinking that we have forgotten how to be a community. Old cultures understood that the well being of youth is a community responsibility and the fate of society depends upon it.

Many youth centers now have a requirement that parents participate in order for kids to maintain their membership.  While I support doing whatever we can to encourage parents to engage more fully in their kids’ lives, these measures serve to further marginalize many youth who need their community the most. The ones whose parents can’t or won’t step up. Then we wonder why we can’t solve the “gang problem” or why our society is becoming more polarized with a large portion of our population ignorant, unable to think for themselves and exploitable by fear tactics. Thus the American dream has become a nightmare to so many young people who have no place to turn.

I sit in conversations with our boys, who tell stories of absent fathers and abusive mothers. Reggie is telling his story of his mom’s abuses and his friend recalls seeing the boy’s mother punch him in the mouth in front of several other people. This gives Reggie the courage to finally tell his story. He recalls his mother telling him not to go to school, that he’s too stupid to learn anyway. Once he gets going, the stories tumble out one after the next. His mom cracking his head open with a bottle (I personally witnessed the damages from that one); having her boyfriend beat him up; guns pulled on him in his own house; coming home on his eighteenth birthday to see all of his clothing tossed out onto the front lawn and mom greeting him at the door to tell him he doesn’t live there anymore. I remember Alejandra telling us of how her grandmother beat her with a hose because she saw another girl disrespect her and Alejandra didn’t “throw down”.

What chance do they have? Well, Alejandra and Reggie will probably be okay, because they found a community to support them when their parents won’t, one that will understand and help them heal these deep wounds. They found Youth Mentoring Connection/Urban Oasis. We will give them the love and positive regard that they don’t get at home. Not because we are a clan of altruistic do-gooders, but because we remember what old cultures knew, that the first responsibility of community is to care for its youth, that the health of our collective soul depends on it. We will then have the moral authority to hold them accountable because we first hold ourselves accountable.
 But what about the thousands of other youth in the same situation that we haven’t reached yet. They will become the parents who abuse their kids because that’s all they were ever shown and they didn’t have a society willing to catch them as they fall through the cracks of abuse and neglect. The cycle continues. 

Unless we stop this cycle by becoming a conscious intentional society, taking responsibility for all of our youth, generations from now we will still be Waiting for Superman.

Youth Mentoring Connection dreams of an Urban Oasis...a campus-like setting in the heart of South Central where kids like Reggie and Alejandra can find the community of support that all youth need. 

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

with respect,
Tony

Tony LoRe

Founder/CEO, Youth Mentoring Connection

Founder, Boarding House Mentors

Vote tomorrow because ignorance is not a virtue!!!

Politics lately has answered the debate about whether racism, homophobia and sexism are still alive in America. So many of the things that we work so hard to overcome in the inner-city are being promoted by the people who want to “take back our country”. As our country becomes more polarized and hate language spreads, conflict and violence seem to be a more acceptable answer for our youth as well. As ignorance becomes portrayed as a virtue in our political discourse it becomes harder to inspire youth to value education. As fear becomes the tactic of those in power to manipulate people to vote against their own interests, youth feeling powerless in their lives, see the power in causing others to fear. Youth reflect their culture.
In all honesty I don’t know how much your vote means anymore in the political process, especially in California where we have tied our politicians hands with the initiative phenomena…and where so many of them are in the pockets of big business. It is however a statement, and maybe if you follow it up with discussion, action and involvement in your community we can move back toward a more civil culture. I am in the business of hope and dreams. So, I vote.
Finally, in glaring contradiction to my belief in nuanced discourse, here are several more reasons to vote tomorrow as reflected in signs seen at the Jon Stewart “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” :

respectfully submitted

Tony

Tony LoRe, CEO & Founder

Youth Mentoring Connection

They Graduated: Now what?

Young people participating in YMC programs are graduating at a rate more than double their friends. As proud as I am of that, our work is not even close to done. The majority of them will go on to college. But we live in a world where succeeding in college is getting more difficult for kids from the inner city. They are hit by the double whammy of higher tuitions and lower family income. It will take so much more dedication, commitment and perseverance for them to make it. The vast majority of them will still have their mentors to encourage them and of course, they have all of us at YMC. So, while we strive to help our young people get to their next graduation we also need to look at what kind of world they will graduate into:

This is how Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund answers the question:

“You are graduating into a nation and world teetering on the brink of moral and economic bankruptcy. Since 1980, our President and Congress have been turning our national plowshares into swords and been bringing good news to the rich at the expense of the poor....Children are the major victims. Our misguided national and work choices are literally killing children daily...Yet governments throughout the world, led by our own, spend over $600 billion a year on arms, while an estimated 1 billion of our world's people live in poverty and 600 million are under- or unemployed. Where is the human commitment and political will to find the relative pittance of money needed to protect children?  …Pick a piece of the problem that you can help solve."
Edelman offered these words at a commencement speech… in 1983!

While I want to emphasize how important it is that we work and pray to try to create a movement to finally start valuing our youth as much as we value war and wealth, I am particularly interested in the last sentence. If you are a mentor you have picked a part of the problem to help solve. If not, please consider what you can do. If so, please consider what more you can do to help make this a more equitable, just and humane world. Edelman also said that “Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.”

What we do for others is our heritage and our legacy. One final quote from this brilliant woman:

“How will we say thanks for the life, earth, nations, and children God has entrusted to our care? What legacies, principles, values, and deeds will we stand for and send to the future through our children to their children and to a spiritually confused, balkanized, and violent world desperately hungering for moral leadership and community?”
Respectfully,


Tony

Tony LoRe
Founder/CEO
Youth Mentoring Connection/Urban Oasis

Founder
Boarding House Mentors

Tony's Blog: Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string

Start with a cage containing five monkeys.

Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it.

Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result - all the monkeys are sprayed with cold water.

Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water.

Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.

The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs.

To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him.

After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one.

The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked.

The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original monkey with a new one.

The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well.

Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys that have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs.

Why not?

Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been around here.

~author unknown


Observation:
After people have been oppressed long enough, they begin to oppress themselves.

Question:
What responsibility do the rest of us have?
…or should we just continue to blame them.

Final observation:
Blaming ourselves for what we inherited doesn't help, but continuing to participate in it is not the answer either.

Respectfully,

Tony LoRe
Founder/CEO
Youth Mentoring Connection