RACINGMIX WORD

War that's Closer to Home
Violence in Oakland is everyone's problem

In the same time span, 56 Americans have been killed in Oakland.

It is nearly as dangerous to be a citizen of Oakland as it is to be a soldier in Iraq. And citizens of Oakland aren't wearing flak jackets and carrying M-16s.

We are poised to spend $87 billion in an attempt to stabilize the postwar chaos and violence in Iraq and rebuild its schools and infrastructure. We are sending the smartest people we can find, harnessing our best ideas, throwing ourselves into the project with the full force of American resources. It is, we are told, an investment in peace.

Oakland, on the other hand, is attempting to stabilize the chaos and violence on its streets by increasing the reward for snitching on bad guys.

That's an oversimplification, I know. Oakland is doing what it can, patching together a community group here, a police task force there, and trying to weave in a steady stream of new ideas. But a person watching these two wars - one half a world away and another in her backyard - might well question why the violence in Oakland, and other nightmarish pockets of this country, doesn't trigger the kind of urgency and vigorous problem-solving we now see directed at Iraq.

"If this were an outbreak of meningitis killing this many people in Oakland, everyone would be all over it," said Arnold Perkins, Alameda County public health director. "This is a contagious disease, and if we made it a priority, we could solve it. But we give it a lot of lip service, myself included."

Homicide numbers are so high they are tracked in the newspapers like Barry Bonds' home run totals. Perkins says he hears folks making bets on whether this year's total will exceed last year's. The smart money is on this year. The death toll stands at 93 so far, compared with 80 at this time last year.

Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, a onetime candidate for president, says our current national leaders don't see what he does on the streets of his city. Their view is long and wide, taking in distant lands and distant people and missing the fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters, dying outside their own doors.

"There is no question that our priorities are skewed, that the need at home is gigantic," Brown said by phone the other day. "The glowing misery at the bottom of our society is becoming intolerable, and it certainly ranks with equal, if not greater, priority as our foreign-policy responsibilities. The ideology mobilizing against mysterious terrorists is politically more satisfying than dealing with more diffuse problems of poverty, mental health and crime."

The brutality in Oakland is escalating. In July, a gunman killed a man who was watering his front lawn, then bolted into the house and shot the man's wife as she called 911. Two of the couple's four children were in the house at the time.

Last week, a 17-year-old was wounded in a drive-by shooting, and a young ironworker ran to his aid. The shooters returned and gunned down the ironworker.

"The abnormal has become normal," Perkins said.

Michael Pritchard, the social working comedian, talked about a group of Oakland girls he saw Saturday after he had spoken to the Catholic Youth Conference of Alameda. The girls, who looked to be 9 or 10 years old, were jumping rope, ducking into and out of the looping rope on a school playground.

"Don't you die, don't be there when the bullets fly," they chanted in sweet singsong voices. "Don't you have your mama cry, don't be there when the gangs roll by."

"Pritchard said he felt sick listening to them. "Where's itsy-bitsy-spider?" he asked, shaking his head.

There are no simple or even clear solutions to the violence in Oakland and other cities, just as there are no simple solutions in Iraq. But when our leaders decide the stakes are high enough, we miraculously allocate the money not only to wage war but to hire experts, flood the post-war zone with workers and rebuild a devastated infrastructure.

I wonder what the death toll has to reach to make the stakes high enough in Oakland.

Essay by Joan Ryan, San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2003
Published online by: Racingmix, October 2, 2003

RACINGMIX WORD