DIRT BETWEEN THEIR TOES

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

DIRT BETWEEN THEIR TOES
By Larry Delano Coleman, Esq.

Back in Howard Law School in the 1970’s, I remember opining that the best way to reform the younger generation of black youth was to make it possible for them to get some “dirt between their toes.”

By that I meant to expose them to rural life, and to get them out of the cities, away from viral influences which distort their development, which undermine their values, and which alienate them from nature, from God and from themselves.

At that time, I did not have any scientific evidence, only personal experience, and anecdotal testimony, to support this assertion.

Now, in a study published in the journal, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 10, 1315-1329 (2009), http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/10/1315, my latent intuitions have been confirmed. In four studies involving 370 people, those immersed in nature were more “prosocial.”

“Antisocial,” as opposed to “prosocial” is what threatens to overwhelm them, now. Crass materialism promoted through media and society combine with low self-esteem, poverty, and hooliganism to mold them. “Hooliganism,” by the way, comes from a family of Irish people who lived in South London’s slums in the 19th century, named “Hooligan,” who were notorious thieves, thugs, and street fighters, who ran in gangs. One writer states of them:

The home of the Hooligan is, as I have implied, within a stone's throw of Lambeth Walk. Law breakers exist in other quarters of London: Drury Lane will furnish forth a small army of pick-pockets, Soho breeds parasites, and the basher of toffs flourishes in the Kingsland Road. But in and about Lambeth Walk we have a colony, compact and easily handled, of sturdy young villains, who start with a grievance against society, and are determined to get their own back. That is their own phrase, their own view. Life has little to give them but what they take. Honest work, if it can be obtained, will bring in but a few shillings a week; and what is that compared to the glorious possibility of nicking a red 'un? http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications7/hooligan-02.htm

The September 27, 2009, beating death of Derrion Albert, a sophomore honor roll student at Christian Fenger Academy High School, in Chicago, Illinois, by rival gangs of young, black hooligans underscores and illustrates the point.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/27/beating-death-of-derrien_n_301319.html
Such a loss! Such a waste! Such a tragedy!

While rustication, country-living, rural life is not necessarily a panacea for current ills, Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden’s Pond was right. People exposed to nature are enriched by the experience. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html.

Dr. George Washington Carver’s whole life was lent to the proof of the axiom that nature is a reflection of the divine. He often stated “"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” http://www.facebook.com/pages/George-Washington-Carver/60725680708. The inventor of the science of chemurgy also stated, "I never have to grope for methods. The method is revealed at the moment I am inspired to create something new…without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless."

Job 12:7-10 is also instructive: “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”

John Calhoun’s famous National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) experiments with rats in the 1950’s suggest, and have been broadly interpreted to mean, that density is a variable in human pathology. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/2308Ramadams.pdf. But, density alone is not the answer. Poverty, inequality, identity crises, and a breakdown in community value transmission stratagems all play a part in an individual’s decisions.

Sometimes, an individual’s decisions are made for him by others or by circumstances beyond an individual’s control. The child soldiers in Africa are very much akin to the “Sistah soldiers” (and brothers) of certain youthful Africans in America. A similar format for remediation may likewise be in order. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/2308Ramadams.pdf.

“Dirt between their toes,” then advocates and encourages a return to nature and an appreciation of nature as a spiritual healing modality http://journeyofhearts.org/healing/nature2.html, for every one, especially for urban African American youth.

More broadly, however, this essay, “Dirt between their toes,” encourages the communion with not only nature, but with the God behind, and the creator of, nature and us, from whom estrangement and isolation is the fomenter of all calamities and the greatest of all tragedies, individually and collectively.

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