I want to write about Frogtown, but I always feel like a failure when I do. The reason behind that is messy. I can't quite get to their level. It's dangerous. It's evil. It's bad. Going down to that point is so ludicrous from my position. I've got a great deal to lose at this point. It's all bitterness and judgementalism from my position. My superior point versus their inferior point. Their continuing pain versus my overcome pain. I came up from some shit, sure. My childhood was a catastrophe in many ways. However, to try to compare it to the ghetto is kinda silly. Trailer parks and relative poverty for a white military kid in OK and KS is far removed from the drugs and gangs of Frogtown. They've all got more money than I ever had during that phase of my childhood. They've got way more financial, educational and social support. But, there is a willful rejection to any form of stability that defies reason present in Frogtown that was never present in my own situation.
In my own childhood, there was always a cause and effect mandate that dictated our daily actions. Dad screamed and broke things because he had a severe “head injury”. He was excepted from the norm due to a factor beyond his control and any situation he caused was a result of factors beyond his control. Specifically, he had problems that were not my own and should not be carried forward by myself. My mother cried and vanished because she had a “chemical imbalance”. She was excepted from the norm due to factors beyond her control and any situation she caused was a result of factors beyond her control. Specifically, she had problems that were not my own...
As an adult, I've accepted and rejected both of my parents' substantial failings on my own terms and in my own ways. Those failings are the circumstances of my childhood and nothing to get too worried about. I believe that is because as a child I believed their actions to be outside myself. Even my mother and father excepted their own actions as inappropriate. When shit went wrong, there was no impetus for me to continue driving in that direction. In fact, I had the luxury of dissecting their actions to such a degree that I could reject not only their direct actions, but also the circumstances leading up to those actions. So, as an adult I work from a relatively fresh slate. I've got my own failings as a husband, father and man to deal with. What my parents failed to do twenty years ago is no longer of great consequence.
For those in Frogtown, the failings of their parents are never made transparent in any way whatsoever. Fathers abandon children systematically to engage in behavior they do not feel is inappropriate in any way. Mothers melt down and descend into neurotic rages without any apology given. For example, I watched a fat woman walk down the street in Frogtown with three children the other day. The kids were all running ahead of her. She continually screamed (and I mean screamed), “You little fuckers! I say get back here! Gonna fuckin' smash yo' heads in if you don't get back here! Little fuckers!” They paid her no mind. As far as the male side of that equation goes, I have to get more personal because the lack of a father is not a public display. Rather, it is an attitude among most men (if that noun can decently apply) in the ghetto. The most descriptive quote I've heard, directly from the mouth of an aforementioned father as it related to the mother of his children, goes like this, “That bitch don' need my money. Fuck it. I need that money. Fuckin' bitch can make her own damn money.”
Growing up in such an environment is just flat damaging. Despite my considerable ability to overcome adversity, I cannot imagine doing so in those circumstances. Generation after generation is lost in a swirling abyss of tragic, self-absorbed self-destruction. It may or may not be fair to blame society. It may or may not be fair to blame racial, ethnic, or class inequality. But, no matter where the blame falls, this is the drama that unfolds continually in Frogtown.
So, there are guns. There are gangs. There are welfare cons, stolen cars, stolen home goods, and stolen lives. There are angry young men and young women angry at those men. Half the boys (literally) don't graduate from high school. The prisons are teeming with the youth of Frogtown. The girls don't bother to marry. They have multiple children with multiple men who are only present on the 1st and 15th. They spend their welfare money on drugs and bad food. They live in public housing that defeats any sense of self-worth and reinforces a sense of reliance on factors way beyond their own control. They pass on defeatist attitudes to their children, who perpetuate those attitudes.
I cannot connect with them. It just seems so damn stupid to me. For me to truly understand the mentality of Frogtown, I'd have to literally engage in it directly. Willfully. I cannot, for the sake of my wife and daughter, do so. I deal with Fogtown daily from my- admittedly- superior vantage point. I look down on them in glowering contempt. I'd like to resolve this matter. I'd like to find a position from which I could approach them as equals and make peace with their very existence. But I cannot, at this point, do that. It's dangerous. It's evil. It's bad. And I'm not willing to risk that for which I've worked so very hard just to make a few friends in a world that knows only enemies. So, I figure, fuck 'em.
