Ganging Up For Good

THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY one point five millions street gang members in the United States, excluding the Klan, the Nazis, the Republican party, and all the other far right wacko groups. Bloods, crips, hell's Angels, black, white, Hispanic - you name it, we gang well got it. Their origins are poverty, loneliness, social alienation, lack of community, desire for community, social marginalization. MS13, the famed central American gang, was formed in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties from Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Salvadorian refugees coming to America to escape wars. It metasticized, and now pervades the United States of Antagonism. Deported Central Americans established branch offices in their countries of origin. There are roughly ten thousand MS13 members in the U.S., perhaps seventy thousand in central America...... Broadly speaking, any gathering together of humans can be called a "gang". Organizations like MS13 run drugs and guns, use drugs and alcohol, kill people, and hang out on street corners in groups, is the widely held notion. there is considerable evidence to support it. But weird things have happened. A fairly large number of gang members have left the gang,s and made a conscious effort to fundamentally change their course in life. Many of them try to convince current gang members to leave the gang, and do better things. there are organizations and counselors for this. Entire gangs have performed acts of incredible kindness and compassion and goodness for various reasons; before going right back to their previous style. the basic impulse being gang life, the basic human characteristic, is surely conducive to peaceful, harmonious, productive human endeavor and achievement. No gangs are not "good" per se, in many of their current incarnations. But the people who join them are - at least potentially. Mr Trump calls them "animals". The problem is, he just leaves it at that. Perhaps the president would do well to remember that we are all, in fact, animals, social animals, and that we really have no reason not to be ashamed of it, so along as we seek our own improvement.