We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease.
Greg BoyleRead
We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.
Interpretation
We should neither vilify individuals in gangs nor idealize gangs as a whole.
Greg Boyle's quote emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of gang life and the individuals within. It calls for a balanced view that recognizes the humanity of gang members while also acknowledging the broader social issues that contribute to gang culture, encouraging empathy rather than judgment.
In practice
In a community meeting discussing gang violence, this quote can be used to promote a more empathetic understanding of gang members.
We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease.
If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.
Relapse happens, especially when you're dealing with folks who are frankly the least likely to succeed based on their own pasts and difficulties. We can work with the most likely to succeed. I'm not interested in that.
Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'
Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with the 'demonized' so that the demonizing will stop; it stands with the 'disposable' so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.
The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.
The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.
What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?" "Stories. And they give me hope.
We tend to think of consecration only as yielding up, when divinely directed, our material possessions. But ultimate consecration is the yielding up of oneself to God. Heart, soul, and mind were the encompassing words of Christ in describing the first commandment, which is constantly, not periodically, operative (see Matt. 22:37). If kept, then our performances will, in turn, be fully consecrated for the lasting welfare of our souls (see 2 Ne. 32:9).
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.
Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.
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