Mike and Erik are two thirty-year-old black men who I was coaching in the gym, yesterday. As I laid out the gear in preparation for the training session they both approached me, asked after my health, and then told me how much it meant to them that I was back in the gym. Sean was still getting gear together up front when Erik asked Mike if there was anywhere safe in Baltimore—that would be affordable to a guy making just over 30-K—that he could move to. His rental in the Pimlico neighborhood, where my father grew up in the 1930s, is getting dangerous. Mike has spent his entire life in the city and Erik is relatively new to town. Mike then gave what I thought was one of the better short statements on survival discipline in Baltimore:
[These guys both speak standard American English, though Mike’s is more formal as he was brought up in a church-going family.]
“Now that I have a wife and child I have to realize that what I am doing here [training boxing for defense] is just buying a few seconds so that I can get to a weapon. Since you can get a permit in Maryland but, for all intents and purposes cannot carry—and every other dude out there has a knife now—the hands are just for making space so I can clear out or get to a weapon. Particularly where my family is concerned, I have no recourse other than the gun. I’m not using hands in the house if I can help it. I keep a shotgun, because in this town they kick down your door.”
“As far as being out and about you have to know how to carry yourself: no gold, no nice watch, nothing they want, no breaking bad, just minding your business and being alert. There are even white dudes in the hood [motions to me] who make their way. It’s a discipline.”
Sean then joined the conversation and I listened to these fellows discuss weapons statutes they had researched, and the conversation kept getting sucked down into that same black hole—the fact that the State of Maryland, and Baltimore City in particular, are essentially hostile to the citizen and in favor of the criminal element.
Mike did a nice job of encapsulating a family man’s survival dilemma in such a place.
It is astonishing to me, to recall that such conversations were rare among men starting families [particularly in gyms] when I was at that stage of my life—and we are to believe that crime and violence are down, reducing decade by decade as the bright torch of liberalism advances?
As a family man making a lot more money, it's hard to know what they're going through. I have crime on my street, but nothing near what these guys deal with. Still, our entire society is opposed to family formation.
We bring in immigrants to work jobs "Americans won't do," but we make work unattractive compared to welfare since Americans go to the back of the line relative to immigrants in hiring. We abort babies. We pay criminal classes to breed, making low-income neighborhoods unsafe. We send jobs overseas. We flood our schools with immigrants and criminal gangs while teaching hatred of God and country. We tell mothers their only value is in the work force rather than mothering. We cause families to distrust one-another with political correctness.
Indeed, we were not having conversations like this 40 years ago.
You pretty much laid out the Fall of Western Society.
I wonder what will rise from it, as I won't be around to see it.
Thanks for the searing reminder. We often forget—I do, anyhow—that the basis for all of these ills is in fact the end goal of the State, which is the destruction of the family.
Why were these conversations rare in your time? Safer neighborhood or just ease of existence?
In many ways the downfall of society has awakened men to their God given nature and called them back to their primary purpose. Like the judges of the Old Testament when society finally got bad enough men rose up and became men once again.
I was living in a rough area when starting a family in the early 1980s. However, there was an assumption that we could defend ourselves and not get locked up and that the police would come to the house when I was at work and the wife called the cops about an attempt to force entry.
Those two assumptions were dead by 85.
I also think it is for the good, that we realize we have to protect ourselves and our own. Judges is right on.
What is really edging people the wrong way is the fact that the life of the criminal that attacks you is, in the eyes of the State, worth as much or more than your life. That is a hard pill to swallow.