Town Ball

Have you seen the CSNBA documentary "Town Ball" yet? It tells the story of two Oakland basketball players, one (the legendary Demetrius 'Hook' Mitchell) who never makes it out, and one (Leon Powe) who manages to go to Cal, then on to the NBA and wins a world championship with the Celtics.

It's more interesting if you are familiar with local basketball players - starting with Bill Russell and up through Gary Payton and Jason Kidd and Antonio Davis - but even if you don't know these guys, you can't help wonder how any of these kids ever manage to grow up. Both Mitchell and Powe come from ridiculously impoverished situations, but as Powe says "there comes a time when you either turn left or you turn right."

The night before last we were all sitting around World Headquarters, talking about how tired our friends with young kids get, providing for their children, driving them to all their programs and events, monitoring their homework and classroom situations, enrolling them in every possible learning experience, making sure they get everything they need. Well, how about all those other kids? The ones who don't have even one parent, who live in foster homes or on the street, skipping school to care for their younger siblings, like Leon Powe did, or sinking into the world of petty theft and drug dealing, like Hook Mitchell?

We talk about economic inequality but are powerless to do anything about it. As the gap between haves and have-nots grows, between computerized and not, between educated and not, between literate and not, between having a vision of possibility or one of dead-end despair, how many millions of good kids will be bypassed and ignored, at best, or led, step-by-step into the penal system, causing how much sorrow on the way?