Hey kiddos!
Today I thought about the time my tiny, rural elementary school brought inmates into my class to tell us gangs are bad, and how clueless, 9-year-old Dad played a part in making that necessary.
The oldest pair of you is in third grade this year. You are (mostly) sweet, good-hearted kids learning the intricacies of interpersonal relationships while those same relationships help mold who you are.
I was a lot like you two when I was your age, but in a much, much smaller town. There was only one class per grade in K-6, and all of K-12 was taught in the same building. I would have made the 24th student in my graduating class if we stuck around long enough, and that included students from far out of town and in communities too small to maintain schools of their own.
I had a small group of friends I was excited to see every day and we spent a lot of our recesses playing together. We started to refer to ourselves as a club and would appoint any remotely building-like structure our clubhouse for the day. This was generally considered fine, provided we didn't keep anyone away from the clubhouse who would complain to the on-duty teacher.
During school vacations a lot of the club went to the same home daycare run by a lady who did not care for my personal brand of innovative childish bullshit. What she did care for was any activity that kept us from needing adult intervention, and during our frequent thunderstorms that meant movies.
When we put her copy of The Little Rascals in the VCR, we had no idea what events we were putting in motion.
It only took one viewing for us to change our "club" into a "gang". As far as I can recall, only the way we referred to ourselves changed.
Little Rascals was my first exposure to any concept of a gang aside from maybe members of Mystery Inc. using it to suggest a group activity. I was 9. I listened to the music my parents had on cassette (hair metal or the Batman Forever soundtrack until the tape warped twice) or the radio in rural Oklahoma. I watched Nickelodeon and played games on their sick AOL-era website. Not much in the way of gangster media.
I had no clue why my teacher gave the class a talking to about being in a gang and we weren't going to stop because some teacher told us to. We were rebels! Like The Little Rascals!
A week later the sheriff brings in a couple inmates from the nearest town of any size to give us a talking to about the dangers of gang life. I wish I could tell you any of what they said, because I am sure it was hilarious to be telling it to a room full of the whitest little farm/oil town children plus the one Hispanic kid. As of our last meeting, not a single member of The Gang remembers what we were told that day, because one of the inmates had a tattoo of a naked lady with real long titties.
Maybe we should have paid attention. One of those kids has spent most of his adult life in and out of correctional facilities and another was in for murder before he could finish middle school. It's hard not to wonder if their lives would be different if our teacher hadn't brought a picture of swinging mammaries in to tell pre-pubescent boys that crime isn't cool.
