By Neil Earle
DUARTE, CA. Gangs, gang warfare, gang violence – here are three of America’s most tragic afflictions. At last count there were about 11,000 gangs in the US with 80,000 members in LA alone.
The scope of the problem is such that it is hard for parents, teachers and community leaders to even get a handle on the problem let alone generate solutions. Anyone attending Father Gregory Boyle’s talk at the eight annual Duarte Festival of Authors in Westminster Gardens on October 2 heard a sensible and compassionate voice beginning to cut through some of the pervasive fog.
Father Boyle is the nationally-recognized founder and inspiration behind Homeboy Industries, a program created in his Boyle Heights Parish in 1988 to create positive alternatives for gang-threatened youth. What began as an elementary school/day-care/job-finding mission in the poorest parish in Los Angeles escalated after the civil unrest of 1992 into a program that now provides training, work opportunities and counseling (and yes, tattoo removal) for rival gang members working side by side. Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Maintenance, etc. are the visible manifestations of an intervention that is seen as a model across the country.
Fr. Boyle began by quoting Mother Theresa: “We’ve forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Separation, he says, is an illusion. “There’s always been US, not I or Them but US.” Service, in Homeboy’s vision, is the hallway to the Grand Ballroom, but the Ballroom itself is Kinship. Kinship is but Father Boyle’s way of stressing the essential message of Jesus in his John 17 prayer, “That they all may be one.”
With that strong philosophical underpinning Homeboys developed the vision of serving each other as “enlightened witnesses” – returning people “back to themselves,” to all of us made in God’s image or as “the shape of God’s heart.” This healthy outlook dismantles messages of shame and disgrace. “We’re all more similar than different,” Jesuit-trained Gregory Boyle asserts.
“Hopeful kids don’t join gangs,” Father Boyle continued. “Recruits are always fleeing something. Gang violence is always about something else. For many kids life is a misery and misery loves company. When kids set out as shooters some night, for example, they’re not so much interested in shooting the target as they are at being killed themselves.”
Hmmm. These are hard-hitting insights but they set up what some might see as an even more bold insight: “Gangs are not a crime issue per se but a community health issue with law-enforcement aspects.” Thus Father Boyle doesn’t believe too much in negotiating with gangs or even gang-to-gang negotiation as between Hamas and Israel in the Middle East, for example. No. This, he maintains, simply validates the gang structures. “Not gangs but gang members” is his preferred approach. “They’ll come through my doors when they’re ready. No amount of me wanting then to have a life can best me wanting them to have a life.”
Homeboys continues to deal with what he calls “a lethal absence of hope” in the face of funding cutbacks that led to the layoff of 330 of 427 employees on May 12. That corner was significantly turned when $3.5 million came in in 45 days. Father Boyle believes in the old adage that prevention is better than cure. “Keeping kids out of detention saves the system $1.6 million per year. That’s a bargain.”
Among the overflow crowd, some of them sporting tattoos, many students from Duarte High School, America’s Promise, and DART representatives were hanging on Boyle’s every word. He knew how to hold attention. Possessor of a droll sense of humor, Father Boyle amused audiences with the escapades of three young men invited to accompany him to a White House conference and reception hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. When actress Diane Keaton showed up at one of his cafes a brash young waitress insisted she had seen her famous customer somewhere before. When Keaton tried to brush it off with fake modesty the waitress-with-attitude retorted: “I know. I know. We were locked up together.”
Such anecdotes and more pepper Boyle’s memoir Tattoos on the Heart which was available for sale at the Festival. Thanks should go to Festival of Authors organizers Mary Barrow, Pat De Rosa, Westminster Gardens and their capable staff for once more providing our citizens with substantial food for thought. To miss it is to really miss something worthwhile. Here’s to next year.
Neil Earle is a pastor and journalist who hosts DCTV’s commentary show “A Second Look.”