Now that it is official, that violent criminals are to be not only tolerated and appeased, that two mayors in succession have given orders to the inept Baltimore City Police Department to curtail deterrent policing and tolerate wholesale destruction of property [of course, the first mayor said this blatantly and her successor has dressed it up a bit] I remain in danger, as a writer, of dehumanizing those charged by the State with terrorizing me.

Adults like myself, accustomed to a lifetime of being threatened and attacked by police and young men, are prone to dismiss the child hero-thug, the small entry-level operative of this vast paleface culling hunt. To me he is a hero, because I understand what a hero is. To you a hero may be a victim of a disease, a man who rode over a land mine in a country your nation was raping, a retard who manages to cross the finishing line at the Special Olympics, a woman who decides to engage in manly pursuits, etc.

But that is your problem. A hero is one who strives against, men, monsters and gods in a quest to distinguish himself from his stay at home fellows—a questing soul, willing to risk his body in order to impose his will on the greater evils of the world. This is not hyperbole. For, if experience, intelligence and understanding of the workings of the world that remain a mystery to the hero, are the hallmarks of the monster and the god, than so stand I in comparison to my hunters—boys who have never won a fight over a man, where I have laid scores of men low in the ring, who have never read a passage in a book, where I have written over a hundred, little, lead-poisoned imbeciles who do not even understand what motivates their parents, where I have hired and fired and disciplined hundreds of adults from their community, in a hometown where they could never place their home-block on the very map I authored.

To these creatures, am I not as Humbaba was to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as the Cyclops to Odysseus, as the Monster and Dragons of the fen, sea and air to Beowulf, as the giant savages of this once forested land were to my English and Irish slave forefathers, brought to the edge of a terrible wilderness peopled by the inexplicable survivors of a vanished age?

The cultural age of HipHop and the political age of Anarcho-Tyranny are well upon me, the savage boogieman, hulking over my hunters, age creeping upon me as I ponder deeper questions in our passing moment together as enemies than my hunters’ entire extended brood will think on in a century. Does that not make me their dragon?

And as men, in the ages before our souls sank into cushy oblivion, did not we seek out the inexplicable foe residing tenaciously in his unfathomable environment, and kill him?

Just as the age of my kind had its hero phase, should not these tiny, toxified souls have their hero quest against that which they do not understand but which somehow holds them in its grasp?

I owe it to these little guys.

Sergeant Alvin York, move over, Lille Dook has got a rep to make.

The First four segments of this hero tome shall be:

Since the Purge

Lille Dook on Patrol

Scope, Under the Hood

Sharp-Strapped Salt Unda Cova