Violence

I recently moved my office from facing out the East side of the building to the North side. We moved down the hall, but it has made a HUGE difference in the action I catch on the street.

On the East side, I used to catch a lot of funny dancing, boom box blasting, and people posted up on the store fronts, hollering at each other. It made for good times and easy distractions when I needed a short break from paperwork.

My favorite day from this vantage point was when there was a boom box blasting old school hip hop on a late Spring morning. Lots of people were outside, drinking beers out of paper sacks, sitting in discarded (or borrowed--possibly from our agency?!) chairs on the sidewalk, and just crowded around one another chatting it up. Most of the people were likely participants in the various community support, homeless prevention, and harm reduction programs, that heavily populate this area of town, but there were also shop owners and passerby alike. I just happened to have looked outside during a good part of the song because there was an elderly gentleman walking down the sidewalk with a cane who stopped abruptly and began to dance. I mean, he started leaning one side of his body on the cane, and the other side of him was humping the air and swiveling his knee to the beat. I about fell to the ground giggling. He jammed on like that for the rest of the song.

Anyway.....from my new vantage point, I see a lot of younger teenage boys gathering on the corner. It's a totally different scene. There are the boys in red and black and then the boys in blue and black. I swear--one minute I'll look up and see the boys in blue and 5 minutes later, they're all gone and it's all boys in red! Unfortunately, the groups of matching teens are members of a gang--I do not assume, I know. I sit in awe watching all the elaborate handshakes as a new person joins the group or walks away.
The other day, I saw a group of 3 boys walking down the street in a tight line. They looked peculiar because they each wore very hardened expressions, walked as a very tight unit--taking up a significant portion of the sidewalk, and one of the boys had a huge piece of wood sticking out of his front pocket. I stood up from my desk to get a closer look because my mind instantly wandered to the "beat stick" I saw on the street a few weeks prior. (The beat stick was a piece of wood--about 2 inches wide and 18 inches long that had "beat stick" written on it in black sharpie. I saw this on my way walking in to work one day) As I looked closer, I noticed that this piece of wood was very large. Seriously, the stick came up to mid torso from his sagging jeans. Then, I started thinking about how it was probably really uncomfortable to have jammed in his pants! (alright, just get all the perverted jokes out of the way....laugh it up--how else do I describe this? !)

It became very clear to me later that evening that there is just so much violence around us. We absorb it all the time without much thought. Sure, not everyone walks to work and finds discarded pieces of lumber with the words "beat stick" printed on them. And even if someone did find this, they might not really believe that this its new purpose. My point is that a lot of people wouldn't have looked up. Or, they would have seen all the kids gathering outside and jumped to conclusions and instantly called the cops on them due to "mob action".

I took the incident for what it was. Sad.....and violent. I don't know for sure where those three boys were headed with the piece of wood jammed in his pocket, but I don't think it was to play stick ball in the park.