http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
For a
minority of young people, being in a gang is exciting, even glamorous; a life
of crime, even violence, brings them local street cred. For some, too, it
provides a sense of belonging that, for various reasons, may be lacking at home;
invariably, they discover soon enough how seriously flawed this simplistic perspective
can be, paying for their mistakes with prison or worse...
There is
no excuse for gang crime. A prevailing irony and tragedy lies in the fact that, given an
opportunity, most gang members have a positive contribution to make in the very
society that condemns them.
There are
two sides to every divide and both need to find a way to be reconciled. Society
needs to ask itself where it is failing some young people to drive them into a
gang culture; what does a gang offer them that it cannot, and why can’t it?
For their
part, gang members need to ask themselves what they really want from life and
make a bigger effort to find it; they certainly won’t find it by using weapons, shooting
drugs or compensating for their own fears by terrorising others. The chances
are the false security of being part of a gang, and the price they must pay
for exercising their contempt for society's better values, will come back to haunt them in its prisons, those universities of crime that major in the art of self-delusion.
Meanwhile, the majority of decent young people remain under threat of being stereotyped by a mindless minority.
PROFILE
OF A HOTSHOT
We called ourselves the Hotshots,
my gang and me
Upholding the right to use a gun,
in our constitution
We’d pick fights on street corners
and raid stores
If some little old lady or a war
vet
in the way…too bad
We were the Hotshots, graduated
from school to streets
No one could touch us because we
had youth on our side
Looks, girls, designer gear and
guns
made us invincible
We even hit prime time News once
(fame at last)
Then a hotshot turned good citizen
and grassed us up
Disbanded now, gone to this prison
or that graveyard
Me, once Mr Fox, now chickenfeed
among old lags
We were the Hotshots, thought guns
were cool
[From: On the Battlefields of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]