Toya Graham Is My Hero, At Least Today

OK, by this time everyone has seen that fascinating video from the riots in Baltimore, where a lady named Toya Graham whacked her rioting son Michael Singleton upside the head (this CBS still picture captures it wonderfully) when she saw him on TV.

"That's my only son", she said, and "I don't want him to be a Freddie Gray."

So what Freddie Gray, exactly, does she not want him to be?  Is that the part of Freddie Gray that was arrested a couple dozen times, mostly for drug offenses, or the one that died in police custody, possibly of self-inflicted injury, after fleeing a group of cops?

I know she meant the latter, but I suspect she also meant the former.  As a mother, she wanted a better life for her son, not just not being an idiot rioting in the streets with no real intent, no goal for doing so, but also resistant to the pull of the drug culture that Freddie Gray was thickly in when he ran from the police and ended up dead.

I've waited to write about Baltimore for a few days, waited for a salient point to rise that maybe not everyone was thinking.  And I think I know what that is.

Moral code.

Toya Graham has six children, a job and a lot of responsibility.  I will decline to presume anything else about her, because I don't know anything else about her.  I do know, however, that she believes it was wrong for her son to be out in the middle of a riot, with aimless people and no goal.

So what, then, is the difference between the moral code of Toya Graham and that of her son, a difference that is so divergent that she had to slap him in public in broad daylight to embarrass him enough to get his butt off the street?

More to the point, why is it so darned hard to communicate morality across generations anymore?

OK, we know it's never been easy. Criminals don't all come from immoral or amoral homes; sometimes they're raised perfectly normally, go to church/synagogue/mosque as kids, and it just doesn't sink in.  Boys, particularly, reach an age where they are trying to impress the girls as being the alpha lion, and part of that includes denigrating all your peers and preening like a peacock.  If you think that putting on a hoodie and a mask and burning drug stores is your way of preening like a peacock, well, maybe your hormones are trumping the sense of right and wrong your mother and father tried to give you.  But a lot of kids in that neighborhood did it anyway.

But let's get back to it.  Toya Graham did not successfully communicate to her son that rioting was stupid, counterproductive, risky to life and limb and, above all, wrong.  Why?  Certainly her views were clear; why did he not pick them up?

I wonder if part of it is not a "community" issue, in this sense: Morals -- right and wrong -- are given us by God.  When we look at the elements of morality, we also see that right and wrong are dominated by our relations with the people around us.  The Ten Commandments say that loudly -- do not lie; do not murder; do not steal; do not commit adultery; do not covet your neighbor's property.  In other words, in living your life, deal respectfully and honorably with your community and those around you.  Absent that, we would have no reason to care.

Had God left us to our own devices and disappeared, would we have developed morality on our own?  Baltimore makes us question that.  Because the Michaels of the world apparently looked at the "community and those around him" and decided that they would steal, they would covet their neighbor's property, and they would burn their neighborhood and inconvenience their neighbors, like the ones dependent on the now-condemned CVS for their prescriptions.  

To me, that says that they looked around at their neighbors -- that is, the rioters and vandals looked at the Toya Grahams, and the senior citizens, and the others in their neighborhood and decided that those people and the community they comprised weren't worthy of respect; weren't worthy of being treated as God's word tells us to treat them. 

However over-the-top the Baltimore police have been -- and remember, this is for once not a racial issue, given the race of the mayor, police chief and enough of the police force -- the disaster appears to me to be that the residents have created, or allowed to be created, a community so lacking in self-respect that its children grow up happy to burn it without regard to people.

I would ask this "Michael" a few questions:

Michael, you were out on the street in the riot before your mama slapped you into leaving.  You had a mask along with your hoodie.  Why did you have a mask?

If you wore a mask so you couldn't be identified, you must have thought you were doing something wrong.  What part of what you were doing did you think was wrong?

You thought you were doing something wrong, but you went out and did it anyway.  That had to be a conscious decision to violate your own morality and help destroy your community.  What was your thinking when you made that conscious decision?  

I care far less what he did than what he had to set aside to do it.  He set aside his sense of right and wrong; he set aside his feelings for his mother, knowing she would not want him to do what he was doing to his community; he set aside any possible regard he might have had for the people of his neighborhood.  He didn't care.

Yet, he set all that aside.  For that, he got slapped repeatedly, embarrassed beyond belief, and made a national laughingstock.  Seems fair to me.

Thanks, Toya.  Keep on mothering; maybe you'll get through to him and to a lot more Michaels.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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