Yeah?
Do you have any long-term goals [INAUDIBLE]
I wrote an article in The Nation that I would
recommend that people get it.
It's a November issue.
And I got a copy just to show you
but I wrote it because I wanted to articulate
some of my thinking.
It's called, "Turning Youth Gangs Around, Throwing Away
Kids." and there's a sentence in here-- a couple of sentences
that says, "What about being tough on crime?
It's tougher to walk these streets,
to listen to young people.
It's tougher to care."
And I have tried to articulate some of my thinking
about what we can do, because I think
we have to challenge this whole idea that our youth are
no good.
That they're lost.
And the only thing left for them is prison and throwing them
away.
We can't accept that.
We got to say that when it comes to our youth,
there is no lost causes.
That everyone has the possibility
of transcendence and change.
And I have seen this.
I have been through a lot of the youth facilities.
I went to the Pima County Youth Facility.
I've been through a lot of them.
I went to-- in California, I went to the Nelles School
for Boys.
Several hundred young men in there.
Ages 10 to 21.
Mostly Chicano, the rest Black.
I had-- there was an assembly.
I talked to all these young men.
It was really great.
Well, after I talked, they were telling me
that there was a place called the Nixon
Unit in the middle of this place that was the super hardcore
kids.
10 to 16-year-olds who had murdered or sex offenders.
And I told them I wanted to talk to them.
And they said, well, nobody's ever talked to them.
And I really said, you know what?
I want to talk to these kids.
Can we do so?
They arranged it.
When I walked into the Nixon Unit, there's two tiers.
The kids are living--
there's only one hole that you can see them through.
And they opened it up and it was dark.
And they turned on the lights and these kids
were coming out of there blinking
their eyes because they hadn't been in the light.
And we had them sit right in the middle, you know,
and we started talking.
And we-- I was just telling my story,
and they laughed and they cried and we
went through all these changes.
And after we got through, one of the guards says, you know what?
I'd never seen these kids show any emotion but rage.
That was the one emotion.
One of the kids came up to me--
16 years old-- came up to me and I was just
going to shake his hand.
He went and hugged me.
And he said, you know what?
I never felt probably Mexican until I heard you talk.
And I could see a glow in his eye.
He was already changing.
I asked him what he was in there for.
Two murders and 11 murder attempts.
As far as this society goes, he ain't going anywhere.
But that's why we got to see it differently.
I'm not saying that there's miracles.
I'm not saying that you do this and everything's--
I work with all these kids in Chicago.
Six of them now are sitting in the county jail,
including my own son.
But it's worth doing it.
It's worth having done it.
It's worth having walked the streets with them.
Because if we don't do it, who's going to do it?
You're thinking Congress?
They're doing-- you know, what are they doing in Congress?
They're setting it up so that their only future's prison.
And I'll tell you something like I told all the people I've
been talking to this week--
they're building-- they got 200,000 new beds
that they got to fill.
And it's like that movie, Field of Dreams.
Remember?
If they build them, they will come?
[LAUGHTER]
If they build them, they will fill those cells.
It'll be our kids.
[APPLAUSE]
If we build colleges, if we build schools,
if we build programs, those kids will go there.
If we build prisons, they'll go there.
Society directs social energy.
And right now, the government is directing it
towards putting our kids away.
And we got to say no.
How come schools are closing down,
libraries are going bankrupt and everything,
and they're building prisons?
This is the thing we got to challenge.
[INAUDIBLE] Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I have a request and I have a comment.
The request is, later on would you [INAUDIBLE]
if you don't have other plans, I was wondering
if you would read [INAUDIBLE].
And then the comment is, what is in your understanding,
what's the relationship between [? militarism ?]
and gang [INAUDIBLE]
I'll tell you a really good one.
There's no way you're going to stop gang violence as
long as you have a gang mentality running
this government.
And it is.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to tell you--
[APPLAUSE]
You deal with the gang up there, you can deal with the gangs
down here.
When they did the Persian Gulf War, what was that?
The drive-- the great drive by, as I call them.
When they went to Baghdad and didn't even have
to see the faces of the people they were bombing and could do
it on a video screen on an airplane
and they could just see the target boom like it's
a video game and blow people away,
100,000 men, women, and children that weren't soldiers
were killed in there.
And it's the same way that we dealt in the barrio.
We saw Sangra as our enemy.
We didn't even see them as human beings.
We had to dehumanize them so when we got them,
we didn't have to feel that pain that they were human beings.
And drive-bys are perfect because you never
have to look in people's eyes.
You never have to see their pain, that sorrow.
You never have to see their mothers crying.
All you have to do is see, they're the enemy.
I kill them.
Boom.
And walk and laugh all the way home
because that's what we did.
And that's the same mentality that runs this government.
It's like this thing about gun control.
How in the world can this country
control guns when it is the number one arms
dealer in this world?
It can't do it.
[APPLAUSE]
To go along with that, I [INAUDIBLE]
and especially [INAUDIBLE]
And if you do anything from fear,
you already made the first mistake.
Fear is never a good reason to do nothing.
I mean, well, when you're getting killed or something
that may be true.
But I'll tell you how this fear works.
And Natalie, I don't know if you heard about this case.
This happened like two or three weeks ago.
Two taggers were in the Hollywood underpass.
Just graffiti.
OK, it's a terrible blight.
They call it a blight and everything else.
This guy, 35-year-old white guy comes in there
armed with a concealed weapon.
Starts challenging these kids.
So they're turning around and says, hey, man leave us alone.
You know, all this kind of stuff.
One had a screwdriver but he apparently
had the screwdriver to break through the fence
so he can get through.
Anyway, the guy pulls out the gun and shoots the both kids.
One of them is killed.
The kid with the screwdriver is shot in the back.
He was on his-- he was turning around
and he shot him in the back.
When the police got the guy, they were--
well, this is murder.
You can't just kill people for nothing.
You know what?
They let him go.
They let him go on the grounds that it was justified.
That he had a fear of these kids.
That a kid had a screwdriver.
Even though the kid that had the screwdriver
was actually walking away.
I mean, how can you be fear when somebody's walking away
from you?
They let him go.
And then when people were pissed off
and the community was saying, how can you do this?
All these people, the public, went out in support.
They brought him food in the jail.
This 35-year-old guy.
I'm glad you did this.
Taggers are bad.
When we have a situation where property
is more important than lives, then we're really in bad shape.
And this is what's happened in our country.
Fear is driving what we do, and we can't let it happen.
We can't let Newt Gingrich's people decide the policies.
We can't let people who don't know anything about us,
don't have to walk the streets, to make
decisions that affect us.
If we don't make our own decisions,
then that's not democracy.
And I'm for democracy.
I just can't stand it when people say, Oh, we're going
to make decisions for you.
You know?
And that's what's happening today.