Addicted to the Streets | Sojourners

Addicted to the Streets

Twelve years ago our dear friend Julia took a badly neglected baby boy away from his crackhead mother and made him her own. That boy, Michael, is now a strong, quiet, menacingly handsome teenager who adores his "Mom" and grudgingly appreciates our fellowship, but is increasingly attracted to street life. Well loved as he is, we will lose him before long.

Inner-city street life now is like crack cocaine was back in the 80s: so potent that almost anyone who tastes it becomes an instant addict. The difference is that while I never understood how anyone who had seen a crack zombie could even consider trying that stuff, I know all too well why boys like Michael are drawn to the corner like moths to a flame. To paraphrase the title of Chris Hedge's recent book about the narcotic nature of war, street life is a force that gives them meaning.

As a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Hedges saw war up close in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America, but his descriptions of the ways desperate people mythologize the glories of conflict, demonize their enemies, corrupt their own language and culture, and become preoccupied with grim perversities of sex and violence remind me of behaviors I see in Walnut Hills, and not only among the hardcore 'soldiers' of the drug trade. In a very real sense, many of our neighbors here embrace the physical and emotional intensity of their daily struggle for survival the way WWII General George Patton embraced combat. "Compared to war," he said, "all other forms of human endeavors shrink to insignificance. God, I love it so!"

Young Michael is not so eloquent, but he and the older boys he admires feel much the same. Their gun battles and fistfights, their ceaseless movement from house to house, their ready money and easy sex, and their constant vigilance against the police and the other gangs create for them a sense of immediacy and camaraderie that no classroom, sports program, or regular job can match. Hustling for food, shelter, the next dollar, or the next high does the same thing, not only for junkies and prostitutes, but also for lots of ordinary poor people navigating the traps and hazards of underclass America. There is no peace in the midst of these struggles, but there is plenty of drama, excitement, and singular purpose. Again, street life is a force which gives them meaning.

What street life does not give, I have come to understand, is true friendship. Instead, the various street soldiers I know here experience that same kind of closeness that real soldiers find in combat, which Hedges describes as comradeship. The essential difference, he writes, is that where friends find in their relationships a heightened awareness of their individual identities, comrades suppress

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