you can do anything you want: KUNM commentary

"If you go to jail, you can do anything you want."

You know that sound a phonograph needle makes, when it swipes over the grooves of a vinyl album: that sound effect they're using these days on tv commercials, to designate that everything has stopped, in utter shock, at profound stupidity? I heard that sound in my head.

I looked around the bus. Nobody else seemed to have heard the kid say it. Even the girl across the aisle, to whom he'd been speaking, looked glassy eyed and disinterested.

But that comment hung in the air, over my head, like a bad smell.

"If you go to jail," I said, looking him dead in the eye, "you're a fool. If you go to college, you can do anything you want." It may not be true, of course, but it still seems a better option than his.

He looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. I suppose I was: Old Lady Speak.

There have been times, on the bus, when I've spoken up and been assaulted. I save my comments for issues I find urgent. I try to mind my own business.

But this is my business. Maybe it doesn't take a whole village to raise a child, but it takes somebody, or else every child gets left behind.

The fact that this kid believed jail meant freedom, or power, or machismo, or adulthood meant that somebody wasn't raising him -- not on the issues of manhood, anyway.

This wasn't the Central Ave. bus through the War Zone. This was the Rio Grande bus. He was picked up in a neighborhood of very affluent homes and dropped off in another.

So, it wasn't watching his neighbors being hauled off to jail that was informing his opinion.

In the 'Zone, jail sometimes does seem like a better alternative than homelessness, domestic abuse or some of the other insanity in which some kids live.

This kid had clothes from the department stores, not the thrift stores. His shoes weren't even scuffed.

Then, I remembered that I'm an anachronism; I don't watch cable tv. My mental landscape isn't decorated with booty and bling bling. I rarely ever see images of guns or hear epithets -- except in public, of course.

On the TV news last night (I don't know which; they all look alike, to me), I heard two boys in a South Valley middle school jumped another kid and broke his nose. Unfortunately, this isn't unusual.

The news reader melodramatically described this as "gang related." Whether it was, or whether that's just an assumption, based on location and surnames of the attackers, I don't know.

What alarmed me was the Bernallilo County Sherrif's comments.

One of the kids had a pellet gun tucked into his pants. Yes, it's a toy; but it looks enough like a real gun to be confusing in a crisis.

The Sherrif's concern was that, had that kid pulled that gun on an officer -- well, he didn't want to think of the consequences.

The War Zone doesn't stop in a geographical area any more. Any kid, in any school, is in danger of fatal injury at any time.

On the PBS show, "NOW with Bill Moyers," someone recently said these double income families work so hard to live in neighbrhoods with good schools.

Sounds like an excellent argument for school funding reform, to me.

Seems to me the kid on the bus would be better off in a more modest neighborhood, with more parenting.

And isn't Columbine High School in a nice neighborhood?