The Absence of Expectation

Reading The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns is an experience. It's not something you can do without being affected, emotionally and otherwise. This is a book about human beings, just like you and me, but human beings who have grown up in the midst of an open-air drug market, and whose lives bear the scars of such a cruel and graceless environment; an environment where human desire in its most corrupt form rules the day, and leaves the well-being of others in its wake.

The book is a mixture of narrative and social commentary, with both being equally effective ways of saying what's what in Baltimore. Anyway, here is Simon and Burns's take on teenage pregnancy, where they come to different conclusions than we might expect:

It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstances and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.

In Baltimore, a city with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at its root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation. On Fayette Street, the babies are born simply because they can be born, because life in this place cannot and will not be lived in the future tense. Given that fact, there is no reason to wait. The babies speak to these child-mothers and child-fathers, justify them, touch their hearts in a way that nothing else in their lives ever will. The government, the schools, the social workers, the public-service announcements wedged in between every black-family-in-the-burbs sitcom -- all wail out the same righteous warning: Wait, don't make the mistake, don't squander every oppportunity in life by having a child too young. But the children of Fayette Street look around them and wonder where an opportunity might actually be found. The platitude is precisely that, and no one is fooled.