Friday Night Lights, & There are No Children Here

Two books, Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger, and There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, both begin in the late 1980s. Both books are also about teenage boys struggling in urban and rural towns of America. Both authors document specific instances of violence which occur in the American communities. The citizens of both cities are greatly affected by the shocking events which occur within their cities as well as by local police forces, schools, and unemployment rates. But the similarities end there. The lives which the football players lead in Odessa, Texas are very different from the lives Pharoah and Lafayette lead in Chicago, Illinois.

The crime is so bad in the Lafayette's home town that he tells writer Kotlowitz that, if he grows up, he wants to be a bus driver. Kotlowitz points out that Lafayette's remark highlights just how tenuous the 10-year-olds life is: most children say "when I grow up," but Lafayette is not sure whether he will live to adulthood (Kotlowitz p. x). The author cites very specific and vivid examples of the violence which Lafayette and his family witness routinely. For instance, on Lafayette's 12th birthday, as he and his cousin Dede were walking to a store, gunfire erupted above their heads. The two children fell to the ground and then crawled home on their hands and knees (Kotlowitz p. 9).

Lafayette has seven brothers and sisters: LaShawn, who sometimes worked as a prostitute to support her drug habit; Paul, who had se

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king into a truck. Even though Lafayette knows that his friend Derrick actually committed the crime, Lafayette refuses to tell because the law of the street forbids ratting on friends. Lafayette is found guilty and given a year's probation (Kotlowitz, pp. 289-299). In the book's epilogue, Kotlowitz admits having broken the rule that journalists should not become involved with the subjects in their stories. Kotlowitz uses his own money to enroll Pharoah and Lafayette in private schools and says he is using the money from his book sales to set up a trust for LaJoe's children and some of their friends (pp. 299-305). But, despite the author's well-intentioned efforts, all he is really doing is putting a band-aid on a very big wound. The author cannot, single-handedly, clear up all of the gang violence, drug abuse, and social problems in Chicago. He has, however, written a poignant book about what he observed while interviewing many teenagers and adults in the Chicago area. Nevertheless, no one person, or one book, is going to change all of the violence in Chicago. Chicago has had problems with crime and drugs for years. LaJoe and her children are merely victims of the environment in which they live. The only way that LaJo

Category: Psychology - F