The 2007 Field of Dreams Speech
The speech from Tony Silard, Executive Director of The Center for Social Leadership follows brief speeches from four youth from the Leader in Youth Program – Donnell Kie, Chris Stevens, Malik Fitzgerald and Andre Johnson – sharing their leadership experiences. Andre Johnson read the following poem written by "The Hurdler" – a collective group of Life Pieces to Masterpieces apprentices at Maya Angelou Public Charter School.
Against All Odds
All these odds against Black men in D.C....
These shoes have to jump so many hurdles in this race to be FREE!
If I do well in school, can I jump over jail?
If I pray every night, can I jump over this hell?
If I run past time, can time really tell?
Or will my shoes turn to boots, as I write my next poem from a cell?
Will the teachers understand that it's a little different for me?
and try a little harder so that I can see?
Will the preachers say a special prayer?
Will the social workers really care?
It seems to me that it shouldn't be my fault.
All these hurdles to jump before I can even walk....
Then...I look out of my window and see a dope fiend nod.
I'm just a young brother trying to beat all these odds.
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Well, I pretty much scrapped my initial speech after what happened at the beginning of this week in Blacksburg, because I don’t know how I could stand up here in front of you and talk about youth leadership without addressing this tragedy and what it signals for our society.
First of all, this is new for Blacksburg, but it’s not new for the young people who participate in our program. Many of them have buried their friends and a good number have even seen them shot and killed. In the neighborhoods where most of the youth we serve live here in Washington, there are still painted shoes hanging over telephone poles. Some shoe colors represent gangs, others are actual shoes of murder victims hung out like trophies by their assassins, others signal the availability of prostitution. This is all still going on in 2007 in our nation’s capital. Young people wear layers of clothing and jackets like protective armor, not unlike a soldier’s uniform in Baghdad. The questions our partners at Life Pieces to Masterpieces hear from their youth are, “Why should we run if we’re going to get shot anyway?” They add: “It’s better to go out fighting.”
If we want to root violence out in our society, we must find its roots. Violence is anger multiplied. And what is anger? Anger is what you feel when your world is not as you want it to be, when your reality is not what you think it should be. You are not angry at your kids unless they’re not acting as you think they should be, or your boss is not acting as you think she or he should be. And how does anger multiply? Through pain.
Pain and anger are the flip sides of the same coin.
Here’s how it works:
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You feel pain as a reaction to what someone else has said or done.
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You blame the other person for causing this pain.
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The resulting feeling gives rise to your anger.
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You direct your anger toward the other person (after all, they caused your pain!) and attack them verbally or physically.
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This causes the other person to feel pain.
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The other person goes to step 1.
You don’t have to look too hard at Blacksburg and Columbine to find the pain, and how it transmuted into anger.
Cho Seung-Hui in his video, and I quote Associated Press, “repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.” In his words: “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing.” He then goes on to say his death will inspire generations of weak and defenseless people. Twisted and deranged, yes. But pain as the root of his anger, which he then expressed with heartless violence, is clear.
Both Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of the Columbine school massacre also felt like they were picked on at school. Klebold said to his parents in their video, "I'm sorry I have so much rage." This pain clearly transmuted into anger.
We grew up hearing that two wrongs don’t make a right. I’ll take it a step further. While they don’t make a right, they do make a lot more wrongs, one after the other. Picture them multiplying like the government agents in the film Men in Black – you feel wronged and wrong someone else through violence, and a whole lot more wrongs sprout up in thin air, like those government agents, one after the other. The more this continues, the more our whole world seems to be wrong.
Our society, from the top level of our government down to our young people getting their education on the street corner, has reverted to Hammurabi’s Code: an eye for an eye. The result is we’re all going blind.
