On A Mission

The old saying is "Into each life a little rain must fall."  Well, if you live in the city of Rochester it's more like "Into each life a little violence must fall."  I knew it would happen eventually, even though I hoped with all I had that it wouldn't.  My son got attacked in the bathroom at his school yesterday.  It was not a headline making instance of school violence.  He is not the first person to be attacked in this way, and he won't be the last.  But it symbolize a kind of loss of innocence for me.  He has no bruises, on the outside anyway.  A couple of kids followed him into the bathroom and called him names, and one of them smacked him in the face.  The school nurse called me to tell me what had happened.  I was expecting a sad child to arrive in my house that afternoon, but he appeared surprisingly upbeat.  I talked to him about it, and he said that it really upset him when it first happened, but that he was not really upset about it anymore.  I am assuming the support he received from the school faculty (with whom he is incredibly popular) helped in this.  But as every good parent should, I opened the dialogue, and my son knows that if he has issues with this he can come to me.  I was informed that the kid who hit him was suspended.

At first I was angry, as any parent would be.  Here I am sending my child to an institution every day where he is supposed to be safe, and he obviously is not.  I was angry with the school, with the faculty for not protecting my son, with the children who did this to him, and with the parents of those children.  When I was told that the child who hit him got suspended, my first reaction was to think "Good.  He deserves it."  But I had trouble reconciling my vindictive thoughts against a 10 year old.  At first glance any parent would be mad, and might consider storming the school in some kind of effort to gain justice for their child.  I was no different.

However, after a little while the anger subsided and I felt sad for those kids.  After all, children don't become thugs on their own.  It's the parental guidance, or lack thereof that usually lead children down the wrong path in life.  

Fast forward to today.  I arrived a little early to the school to pick up my daughter.  It was about 11:30 in the morning.  I could not help but notice a child, that was about my son's age, walking down the street.  Something about him struck me.  I realized that he could be the very child who hit my son and was suspended from school.  As he walked he stared at the ground.  He looked so sad and lost.  I sat in my car and watched him walk by.  As he walked away from where I was sitting I could see that he was wearing pants that were way too small for him.  He was sagging them, but I could not tell if it was in an effort to look tough, or because had he pulled them up the way they were supposed to be the cuffs might have almost reached his knees.  I don't know what it was about him, but it almost made me cry.  I wanted to reach out to him.  I wanted to ask him if he was ok.  I wanted to know why he looked so sad. I wanted to help him.  Of course I didn't, because more times than not other adults would look at me like I was trying to do something bad to him or something.  You just can't trust anyone these days, especially when it comes to kids, so even with the best intentions you can't just go up and start talking to someone else's kid without being thought of as a possible bad person who is up to something.  I thought "So what can I do?"

This city is quickly becoming a cess pool of violence and wannabe gangsters.  I remember recently hearing a story on the radio about a guy who was at a Taco Bell when some teenagers started throwing hot sauce packets around.  They hit this guy, so he spoke up and asked them to stop.  One of the teenagers lifted up his shirt and showed a gun and said "You wanna ask me that again?"  The guy telling the story had called into a national radio show that is closely linked with Rochester.  The morning show personality said "You, sir must be calling from Rochester, because stuff like that happens every day in Rochester."  Yes, he was calling from Rochester.  The morning radio show went on to talk about how violent Rochester is for another 20 minutes.  It made me feel sad, and guilty at the same time.  Is this really what I brought my own children to live among?

About a month ago, I went to an interview for a volunteer gig at the Center for Youth Services here in Rochester.  I was telling the woman who interviewed me about how we had lived outside of Rochester for about 5 years and then came back.  She gave me a surprised look and said, "Most people don't do that."  I thought about those words and I realized that she was right.  Most people don't do that. Most people make a goal to get the hell out of this city and when they do, they don't look back.  It started to make me feel guilty.  How could I do this to my kids?  How could I bring them back to such a violent place?  I felt guilty when I found out about what happened to my son, because maybe if he had still been in that little hick town, this might not have happened to him. I had to bring myself to the realization that it might have.  Kids get punked in the bathroom at suburban and rural schools too.  

But when I saw that kid today, walking down the cold street, looking at the ground, his sadness palpable to me as I sat in my warm car, I started to think about it differently.  What if I was meant to come back to the city?  What if I was meant to be here to help do something about kids like him?  And to protect kids like my son by  helping address the issue of violence among the kids who perpetrate it.  What if I was meant to be that one person for that one kid who helps keep him or her from going down the wrong path when the rest of the world seems to be sending them on a fast track down that path?  

I have a feeling that my volunteer gig at the Center for Youth Services is just the beginning.  I feel that I was lead here for a reason.  And that reason will bring me to making a difference in the lives of kids like the one I saw today.  I might not have been able to help that one kid, on this one day, but the memory of him and the feelings I had as I watched him aimlessly walk down that wet snowy road is something I will take with me throughout this journey.  And I will always hope that one day I might see him again, and get the chance to make a difference in his life too.