Let's Get It Right

As our Washington State legislators look at options for curbing violence, if - or rather since - we are indeed to address this issue of violence “in a comprehensive manner,” as Sen. Mike Padden suggests, then far from being left out of the discussion as to solutions – but rather at the very top of the list – is what kids need most to prevent such Newtown atrocities from happening in the first place: a mentor.

President Obama, at a prayer vigil at Sandy Hook, declared

So, let’s get it right.

Every school district needs a full-time mentor coordinator.

Every child, plus every child with a mentor, equals every child’s success.

Far from the “there’s-little-we-can-do-to-prevent-another-massacre” as one headline read, there is much we can do.  When we consider that mass murders most often happen in smaller communities by intensely isolated and alienated youth, as another columnist suggested, then it’s more than abundantly clear what’s needed and needed most: mentors.

"Young men need fathers and need them desperately, but the out-of-wedlock birth rate in black America,” for example, “is 75 percent.  Fewer than half of young black men graduate from high school, and for far too many black boys public schools are jails before they get to real jails. Young men staring down such bleak prospects are young men without hope. And young men without hope can do desperate, senseless things”  (The National Review, January 17, 2013). 

The Tillicum Woodbrook Neighborhood Association will be addressing this at our meeting on February 7, 2013, 6:30 P.M., Tillicum Community Center, 14916 Washington Ave. SW., Lakewood, WA. 

It should be filled to capacity with soldiers returning from deployment who need a new mission.  What better to stop the epidemic-scale suicide rate among our troops than to give them a reason for being: pouring their lives into young men without hope?

Legislators from city to county to state to congress should gather around the children of our State of Washington and through mentoring make ours a model of revitalizing and reclaiming and restoring communities by so practical a means: mentoring.

One of our own is proof.

Let’s get it right.

David Anderson, President

Tillicum Woodbrook Neighborhood Association

communitymattersweb@gmail.com