Commentary: If Congress Can Have Hearings on Steroids, Where’re the Hearings on Gangs?
Date: Sunday, March 20, 2005
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com


Despite all the hoopla over the congressional hearings into Major League Baseball and steroids, no one expects anything really substantive to flow from Capitol Hill. The worst Congress could do is revoke MLB’s exemption from federal anti-trust laws – the concession that allows teams to effectively monopolize the sport. Not even the most politically inept lawmaker would do that to “the great national pastime.� Not over this.

The improbability of meaningful legislation to address the illegal use of steroids in sports does not mean, however, that last week’s hearings were for naught.

After all, the White House is not the country’s only bully pulpit. The president’s is the most powerful in the world, but Congress has one too and, with it, House and Senate members can make mountains out of mole hills, raising awareness and raising the public dander so that, before you know it, the American people are up in arms about something they didn’t give much of a hoot about before.

That’s how it works. Publicity drives the passion that drives the politics that drives policy.

Ergo, steroids. The topic is now on the political pollsters’ pulse screens, where, suddenly, the people’s passions are moving the needles. You can thank, or curse, Congress for getting folks all hot and bothered over an issue that, in actuality, involves only a relative few of us.

Congress responded similarly to the Columbine High School tragedy of 1999. In the aftermath, both houses convened investigative hearings to determine (a) how in the world two American kids from Colorado went berserk and killed classmates, teachers and themselves; and (b) what should be done to prevent another schoolhouse horror.

The burst of attention paid the steroids scandal (or scandalette) and the Columbine atrocity raises one haunting question: Where is the hoopla, the outrage, the alarm and the concern over the street gang epidemic that has ended or ruined a thousand times more lives than those done in by steroids and Columbine put together?

You can’t argue that street gangs are a mere annoyance. Not when babies wriggling in their cribs or toddlers playing on their living room floors or grandmothers sitting on their porches or teenagers standing on their corners have been dispatched prematurely to the grave, courtesy of a leaden missile that flew through the night air because someone who couldn’t shoot straight wanted to send a message.

Not when so many youth – most often, black, Latino and Asian, but increasingly white – find more hospitality in a gang than in the classroom or the community at large. There is a logic behind the term “homies;� often, a gathering of fellow gang-bangers is the only place that feels like home.

These kids live on the downside, the underbelly of American life. Theirs is a world of anger, intimidation and vengeance. Instead of looking forward to a promising future, they spend their lives looking backward, over their shoulders, in case a rival or the law is closing in. Many have either lost or buried the capacity to care about the other guy’s life, let alone how his family will feel when he’s taken out. Some don’t even seem to care what about their own families’ grief when they are caught and convicted; or about the danger their loved ones might face when the other guy’s posse seeks revenge.

Where is Congress on this one? Why has it not used the pulpit to get the public riled about this? Could it be that its members are satisfied with a silent policy of containment – that gangs are a “them,� not “us,� problem? And might they believe that such violence among young people, who are supposed to be our finest dreamers, is only inevitable when those young people are of color? In other words, might they believe that violence is a failure of nurture in Columbine but a function of nature in Baltimore?

Make no mistake. Even if we never hear another peep out of Congress about steroids and sports, it has already succeeded in raising the alert about the damage those drugs can do to both health and integrity. Somewhere, a parent is paying more attention.

It’s late in the day, but not too late, for Congress to get out of sorts over street gangs. One day of hearings would be a start. Somewhere, someone will listen.