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May 2, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:37
2964 The Truth About Freddie Gray
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I want you to think of a boy.
A boy born into an alien planet to most of us.
A near literal hellscape of social decay and rats running through garbage and dirty needles and used condoms littering the streets.
I want you to think of a boy born into this world, born prematurely, having to spend his first few months in hospital, perhaps outside regular human touch and his mother's skin contact.
I want you to think of a boy who is born into a decaying city And the teenagers who live in that decaying city have worse health and mental health and career prospect outcomes than children in Nigeria, than children in much poorer New Delhi in India.
I want you to think of a boy born into what can only be called a toxic hovel, a poisonous home.
A boy whose mother is a drug addict, whose mother is a heroin addict, who didn't have much education and couldn't even read.
I want you to think of a boy whose toddler hurt his first month in hospital and then at home listening to screams and cries and fights and gunshots not coming from the television though perhaps there too but coming from his entire environment from the pens of little section 8 apartments around him his mother lying on
a soil dirty mattress lying on a couch unable to care from him stupefied with drugs.
When you think of a boy who's who's really hungry and who when he can crawl move out of his crib or his cardboard box Goes over to the wall and sees pretty colors on the wall and pulls at them like all babies.
Puts the pretty colors in his mouth and they taste a little sweet.
It's a good taste and a nice taste.
You're hungry.
So you eat These colorful chips that look like flat candy and taste like slight sweetness and contain toxic amounts of lead.
These paint chips.
And the lead will work its way into your body.
The lead will work its way into your brain, into your teeth, into your bones and be released over years causing brain problems Skeletal problems, kidney problems, you name it.
Think of that, boy.
Think of you or me being born into that lead-lined semi-coffin of a toxic hovel.
In a home, in a building, on a street that the 21st century seems to have left deep in the rear view of near-medieval brutality and violence.
In a city that is one of the most dangerous cities in America.
In a city where a police force of 3,000 attempts to grapple with 200 murders every year in addition to doing everything else that a police force is supposed to do.
A city where the broken are at war with the breakers.
You can't go out to play, it's too dangerous.
Yes.
Gunfire, dirty needles, garbage, rats!
You cannot go to play outside.
You're propped up, staring at a television, playing endless videos of cool young men with pretty women, lots of money, and no jobs.
You're born without a mother's touch.
You grew up with a drug-addicted mother, eating lead chips from the walls of your toxic cave.
And then, maybe you're placed in kindergarten.
Maybe you're placed in school.
In a school system where 13% of the kids in grade 8 are performing at grade level.
And only 16% are reading at grade level.
Of course, your mother can't even read.
What can she teach you?
Other than, don't go outside.
A school system which spends $18,000 a year on students where there are...
There's one teacher for every 15 kids.
There are...
There's one worker for every five or six children and they cannot get the kids educated in any way, shape or form.
Your child has no choice about going there and your mother has no choice about sending you there.
Think of a boy who grows up without a father.
In Africa, his father would probably be dead from AIDS, absent from disease, In Baltimore, this boy's father is absent through jail, through incarceration.
Because where you live has just about the highest incarceration rate in the state.
You're born without a father, born without a glimpse of green out of your toxic prison.
A drug-addicted mother.
No education, no reading, no stimulation, few cuddles, few hugs.
Nutrition, gone.
Blue skies, green fields, gone.
And the only animals you see are the four-legged kind that bite in the night.
And I want you to think of this boy, this Broken soul who grows up into someone we can put at a safe distance and we can condemn.
Gangbanger a bad seed.
Kid gone wrong.
Can you tell me that if you were not born into that skin that you would not likely turn out the same way?
I cannot with confidence say that in any way shape or form.
In the school that you go to, there are metal detectors.
The windows are broken.
There are weapons that get through the metal detectors.
There are, again, rats, dirty needles, used condoms in the stairwell.
Every time there's a shout and a fight, all the cell phones come out and record it, and nobody intervenes to stop it.
They simply make recordings of it to post for other people.
Here's what life is like inside the human zoo.
And there are kids in that school even more damaged and hurt and broken than you.
And because everybody's forced to be there, the social mores, the values, they sink to the lowest common denominator, and you have Lord of the Flies in the heart of a dark and broken city.
And there are no jobs, and nobody you know has a job, and nobody you know their parents don't have jobs, maybe their grandparents haven't even had jobs.
The idea of getting up and going to work for a living Is incomprehensible.
Only a sucker would do that.
And your life is the same.
And the future looks the same.
You and I, we walk in a straight path from A to goal.
This young man, who could be you and could be me, gets shoved into a revolving door of broken glass and spins and spins and spins And all the days are like the last days and all the days to come will be like the days today.
And there is sweet relief in drugs.
I want you to think of a boy who gets the nickname Pepper.
Perhaps because Pepper is a street name for amphetamine.
But you take a drug just as your mother took a drug.
Not to feel better, but to feel close to normal.
To take away the agony of existence and feel like you and I feel every day just for a few minutes, no matter what the cost, no matter what it does.
In the future there is only the salvation of the now.
There is only the survival of the now.
There is only the easing of agony of the now.
and the poison works its way through your mother's body the poison of the heroin and the poison of the lead works its way through your body because you may have stopped eating lead and you have stopped eating lead but by God lead has not stopped eating you and working its way with grim decaying pulling apart crypt keeper fingers and undoing the very essence of your existence your nerves your organs your bones Are
brittle.
And you could stay in school, but there's nothing to learn and nothing to learn for.
What are you going to do if you learn?
What would be the point?
Would you spend a lot of time learning a dead language that nobody speaks?
Well, the dead language that nobody speaks for Freddie Gray could be termed civilization itself.
And that is the grim tragedy of his existence.
So maybe you take some drugs.
You need some money to get some drugs.
Maybe you sell some drugs, do a little burglary, get caught.
Thank you.
Thank you.
But your conscience is like a fingernail.
Clip it, take it away, it doesn't even hurt.
What have I got to lose?
You will say to yourself.
There is no salvation in this layer of hell.
And you know Like the Eloi, there are people living better lives elsewhere, you see them on television, and there is blind fury, there is envy, there is rage, there is frustration, there is humiliation that eats you alive deep down that also you must drown in drugs and distraction and sex and drink and danger.
You become like a Frankenstein's monster.
you need half a sky full of concentrated electricity to feel alive for five minutes.
And in school when you cause some trouble, as a lot of children did as I did, you cause some trouble, you don't get detention, you don't get lines.
The cops come.
The cops come and grab and shove and move and pull and grab and you see this even before it even happens to you.
The cops are called because there are no fathers and no discipline and nothing to live for and no structure that anybody respects.
And so the school administrators, the teachers can't do anything in the face of the aggression of the broken and they call the cops and then the cops start pulling you in and causing you resentment.
These are the male authority figures that you see.
People in music videos, people on sports teams who at least look a little bit more like you and cops who half the time at least don't.
And there is a funneling of children through the criminalization of childhood There is a funneling of children into jails and into profits because the corporations who donate to the politicians who put people in jail profit from the prisoners in jail, which gives them money to donate to the politicians that put people in jail so the corporations can profit for the labor of those in jail.
You see, the revolving door is not just you, but everything around you.
Broken girls grow up to have sex with broken boys, and 50% of the girls around you from 15 to 19 have already been pregnant once, and 10% of the girls around you have been assaulted or raped, not even by their intimate partner in the last year alone.
This is the feral hell that you were born into, that you can't see beyond.
So you start to fall, but really, there's nothing to stand on anyway, why not fall?
It's like stepping on a cloud, trying to have a future.
Freddie Gray-shaped hole in the cloud, and a fall into the justice system, as it is laughably called, the criminal system.
And you accumulate arrests, and you get arrests five times, and ten times, and fifteen times, and twenty times, and at the time of your demise, there are five court cases outstanding against you.
You can't get a job, you can't move, you can't achieve.
Environment, culture, beliefs, whatever it is.
And then you are on a street corner and the cops come.
And like people who've come before you that you've heard of, Like Walter Scott, like Eric Garner.
You say, I can't do it again.
Enough.
Enough.
I cannot do it again.
I cannot have the same day again and again and again and again.
And you snap and you run.
Like baying hounds, they chase after you.
And maybe they tackle you and put their knee into your neck.
And then, and then, and then we don't know.
Six police officers have been charged with various counts, including murder and manslaughter, three black and three white, and we don't know.
We don't know what's going to happen.
We don't know what facts may or may not come out.
You get into that van or you're put into that van and you come out broken in neck as well as in body as well as in spirit.
And the neck injury is the last injury in an incredibly long line of injuries, of brutalities, of losses that you have endured.
And if you're alive after you die, you fly over a burning city.
You fly over a protesting and pained and thieving city.
And you fly over flying rocks and flying bullets.
And cut hoses.
And you fly over.
see the whole world beneath you convulsing and caring as a son to a candle after you died about you then before.
more.
That the city is in convulsions and you have the attention of everybody from the president on down to the wine house and everybody speaks your name and everybody cries, no justice, no peace, no justice, no peace.
But it does you no good now.
Whereas it would have done you some unbelievable, immense, life-changing good when you were a fetus, when you were a baby, when you were a toddler, when you were a child.
Where were the energy of the rioters to shield and protect you from a harsh and broken home?
Where were the people who are willing to burn down stores?
Where were the people who might have been willing to come in and clean out the lead from your toxic cave when you were a baby?
Where was the energy?
Where was the focus?
Where was the help that you could have gotten when it would have made a difference?
When the energy would not have been the agonized tears crying because you have to mourn someone, but the satisfied grin of having saved someone.
Because prevention is not as dramatic as burning.
Because when you prevent these situations, these souls to be ground and broken up and reassembled into savage robots of electric history, of burning history, of raging history, when you prevent that, there are no riots.
There is no line of police.
There is only having pulled someone from the sea of history to the shores of peace.
And where's the drama in that?
Who comes to shout slogans at a near miss, at a salvation, at an avoidance?
Who?
I am a philosopher.
I am a philosopher.
And as a philosopher, all of my prescriptions, all of my solutions are very, very early.
I'm like a nutritionist.
You're having a heart attack because you didn't listen to your nutritionist 20 years ago or 10 years ago or even 5 years ago.
No point calling the nutritionist saying, hey, I'm having a heart attack.
The nutritionist will say, can't help you, call Emerge.
It's too late for me.
I can't help you.
The prescriptions of philosophy are the prescriptions of prevention and the prescriptions of prevention are the prescriptions of early intervention.
To hell with cheering now.
To hell with cheering now.
This young man needed help, comfort, succor, protection, and a secure environment when he was born.
The burning now was the burning in the crib, the formation of his soul, in the formation of his being.
I am a philosopher.
And what happened in that van really matters.
It really matters because he was a goddamn human being.
It matters.
But I am a philosopher.
Archimedes said, "Give me a lever big enough and I can move the world." I say, give me a wisdom early enough and I can save the world.
It matters what happened in that van.
And let us seek to find out what happened in that van.
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