Two weeks ago, the press gave a lot of attention to Sherry Murphy, a middle-aged go-go dancer in Newark, NJ who was starving three of her young nephews in her basement, one of whom died before being rescued. While I feel the same shock and grief that most everyone feels for Faheem, the boy who died, and for his brothers Raheem and Tyrone, who will live, I’ve been noticing some adjacent tragedies in the stories of the other characters in the case. One of them is Fuquan Williams, the 11-year old brother of the victims, who was no longer living with his aunt; another is Wesley Thomas, the 16 year old son of Murphy, who recently told authorities about his involvement in the death of Faheem (he claims to have unintentionally knocked Faheem out while wrestling with him, from which the 7-year old never recovered).

Both Fuquan and Wesley experienced the same pattern of neglect and abuse that eventually killed Faheem: parents and guardians with criminal records and substance abuse habits, inadequate attention, physical and mental abuse from family and visitors, lack of health care, shuffled frequently between various relatives and caretakers, fathers either unknown (in Fuquan’s case) or infamously known (a registered sex offender, in Wesley’s case), intermittent schooling at best, and a broken-down child protection agency that prematurely closed their case. In sum, a highly chaotic nightmare for an adult, hell to a child (recall the Pat Benatar song, Hell is For Children).

Unfortunately, this is a story of urban poverty, even if Sherry Murphy and her cousin (Melissa Williams, the fugitive mother of the children) did hold jobs and lived in relatively pleasant surroundings (they were not welfare queens living in the projects). They were people that could have made it in the working world, but some sort of psychological and emotional instability, the kind too often found amidst the inner-city poor (and many other groups, of course), infected their lives and found its way to their children. This is the cycle of poverty hard at work, reaching even those who seemingly have the resources to escape it — although one must admit, the aunt and the mother were not simply innocent victims of forces beyond their control. They must stand accountable for what happened. They are not poster-children for the urban poor, most of whom are honest, hard-working and conscientious caregivers; nevertheless, this is a repetitious social infection that is still too common in the city. And the results are young criminals in the making.

Wesley has already graduated; at age 16, he has a police record involving weapons and drugs, and now faces assault charges regarding Faheem. (And yes, he is a parent). As to 11 year old Fuquan, his life could go either way. Not surprisingly, he has severe emotional and learning problems, and exhibits angry and erratic behavior. However, he is now in the legal custody of a seemingly stable, regularly employed uncle who has him enrolled in a special institution. With enough stability and guidance, and in the company of a male role model, Fuquan might have a chance to pull himself out. But then again, most of the special programs for troubled youth like him tend to “graduate” their participants at age 16, due to limited resources. Fuquan may not be ready at age 16 to face the world, even with his uncle’s well-intended help. He may never be able to go back to a regular high school, and would probably have little chance of succeeding in the typical “non-professional” career tracks of today, which require either technical acumen (e.g., an office equipment repairman) or a flair for customer relations (e.g., a bank teller). The call of the gangs and the streets may be too much for him. Along with Wesley, Fuquan may be another Native Son. Another American tragedy slowly unfolding itself in the city.

I now work in a district attorney’s office in an urban area (and yes, some days I do scratch my head and wonder what am I doing there). I’m not a trial attorney, so I’m not directly involved in criminal prosecution. However, I do talk with some of the “APs” (assistant prosecutors), and today I heard something quite interesting. Over the past 5 or 6 years, we’ve had a spectacular increase in gang activity in the poor neighborhoods. We now have local chapters of the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings and some home-brewed groups too, and just like everywhere else in the nation where gangs reign, they play for keeps (with their loyalty oaths, colors, signs, drug running, and murders). My AP friend was telling me that the gangs are using some interesting tactics to defeat our tried and true prosecution strategies. DAs often offer a defendant a lenient sentence so as to obtain testimony needed to nail a partner in crime, usually a “bigger fish”. The gangs are defeating this by telling the “little fish” who get caught to go along with the deal at first, to agree to “sing” against a higher-up in the gang — but then, once the jury is empanelled in the trial of the “bigger fish”, to hush up. The little fish then gets nailed, the DA gets the judge to throw the book at him, maximum sentence. But the big fish swims off, knowing that once a jury is empanelled, the double jeopardy rule prevents the prosecution from going after them again for the crime in question.

This shows that there is some incredible loyalty going on amidst the gang members out in the bad streets. The “little one”, in his “love” (or whatever) for the group, accepts a long term in prison so that the senior members of the gang may continue their work. This is new to most prosecutors, who traditionally depend upon the lack of honor amidst thieves and murderers in order to divide and conquer.

What this says to me is that something really scary is going on in the ghettos — a lot of people are abandoning all hope in the system. They don’t see any way out, given the widening gap that our information-age techno-economy is causing between the haves and the have-nots. So, they are abandoning the ways of liberal society (given that liberal society has in many ways abandoned them) and adapting insect-like rules of living, banding together in colonies and offering up their lives for the good of the hive. Unfortunately, those colonies and hives (i.e., the urban gangs) have little sympathy for the law and the order of the civilized society that they seceded from. The dynamics of urban poverty are pushing its captives into a dangerous new phase — which, if continued, is going to create some big headlines in another 5 or 10 years. What I’m imaging here — actually, “nightmaring”, if that is a word — is going to involve National Guard troops, smoke, and of course, lots of blood.

More food for a scary thought: think about the parallels between our urban gangs and the international terrorists, including Al Qaeda and the Palestinian terror bombers. In other words, this isn’t just a local trend. There has always been poverty, but in today’s internationalized, internet-ized world, where everyone has exposure to the media no matter how illiterate or how remote they are, the poor realize that a lot of people aren’t poor and a lot of places aren’t squalid, but that there is just about no way for them to jump the gap. Hard work and self-belief don’t do it anymore. You need to grow up in educated circumstances with educated parents and computer screens most everywhere you look. If you are an 18 year old living in a village in Nigeria or the West Bank or Karachi, or on the streets of South Chicago, you know it’s way too late for that. So, you might as well join the gang or the cell and take the loyalty pledge, embrace what they drill into your mind, be ready to murder and be ready to be murdered, or at least be put away for life.

Do I really believe it’s too late to head off an impending Armageddon between the poor and the rich? If I did think that, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. But darn, we rich folk had better start thinking and doing something more about this, and soon. Our fences won’t hold; those walls being built right now by the Israelis on the West Bank are just another Maginot Line. We’re going to have to somehow reach out to the poor of the world with the education and acculturation necessary to bring them into our world. Sure, that would mean that we’d be a bit less rich for a while, maybe quite a while. And the poor aren’t going to continually thank us and make us feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves while we’re doing it — they’re not easy to work with. But in the long run, it’s the only hope.

Back in the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, there were a lot of intellectual “cross-trainers” around: educated people who applied their minds to a variety of subjects including philosophy, mathematics, science, commerce and government. Ben Franklin is a good example, but you also had Thomas Jefferson, Rene Descartes, Leonardo DaVinci, etc. Today, of course, you don’t find many people like that. There’s so much knowledge out there now, you need to specialize in order to be taken seriously.

That’s too bad. There are still a few thinkers left who cross boundaries, who try to weave science and humane thought together. But they aren’t too common anymore. Rarer still are those who know what they’re talking about. In the 20th Century there was C.P. Snow and Jacob Bronowski, and we still have Robert Pirsig. I am currently picking through Pirsig’s second book Lila. Despite the fact that Lila doesn’t possess the charm of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance (it’s actually a rather strange book), there are occasional brilliant insights in that book. It’s like rooting around a garbage dump, looking for diamonds — and occasionally finding some. The garbage dump is Pirsig’s grandiose “Metaphysics of Quality” and his blather about “values”, and the diamonds are found when Pirsig sucessfully melds philosophical and scientific insight, such as his comparison of the various levels of functioning within a computer with the idea of a mind existing within a mechanistic human brain, and the idea of a society existing amidst a host of independent, non-cooperative human egos.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic about a writer named Henry Adams. This Adams was not one of the early Presidents of the US (although he was one of their descendents), nor is he a character from the 1960s show The Addams Family. Henry Adams was a cranky blue-blood who lived around the turn of the 20th Century, who concerned himself with the overall state of human affairs. In 1906 he authored “The Education of Henry Adams”, wherein he tried to build a philosophy based upon the lessons of history and science. He asked whether creation has a particular purpose, or is just an accident of circumstance. As with most people who ask such questions, he didn’t come up with a definitive answer. But at least he asked the question and was taken seriously. Today, if you ask that question, you aren’t taken very seriously. In an age of intellectual specialization, anyone who asks the big questions is automatically put into the “fuzzy mystic” box. OK, well, maybe Ken Wilber and Fritjof Capra and their like can be accused of speaking and writing a bit too much and forgetting to come back to earth sometimes. You wonder if they have in fact nailed down the basics of differential calculus and iambic pentameter.

Nevertheless, it’s too bad. Just not a good time for big thinking.