Gianno Caldwell - Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed

Yo, you gotta get your sister, man.

The stranger whod stopped us was talking to my uncle, and the sister in question was my mom. It was morning. Springtime. I had been walking to school with my uncle, who was only five years older than me, when the man saw us and jogged across the street. I was nine.

What do you mean? my uncle asked. Whats going on?

She, you know The guy looked pained, considering his next words carefully, but eventually he pressed ahead. She had sex with three or four dudes. He pointed. Right inside that building.

Shed done it for drugs, I thought. He didnt have to say it. We all knew. Pills, marijuana, crack cocaine

We stood together, an odd fellowship in this alley along 72nd Street, all of us looking at the vacant building. It loomed over us, a dead and empty thing with shattered windows and yellow skin peeling from the walls. Caught in its long shadow, I adjusted the book bag on my shoulder.

Thanks, my uncle said. Wellokay. Thanks.

I went to school, but the events of that morning festered all day. The embarrassment that, undeniably, the whole community knew. Multiplication tables and vocabulary quizzes now meant nothing to me. I could no longer pretend that our family was the only one who knew how bad it had gotten.

In high school, my mom had been an honor-roll student with perfect attendance, but in the years that followed, she had become an addict whod do anything for more drugs. She now ran with the worst sorts of people. She sometimes left her own kids, including my two young sisters, alone with guys shed just met while she snuck off to get high.

Its not like my family ever hid this fact, at least among ourselves. For us, everything was always out in the open. I grew up witnessing arguments and declarations of Were poor! or Youre high! or Shes prostituting herself out to some drug dealer! I grew up enduring this information, comfortable with the faint delusion that our familys problems were private.

But now I knew for sure. Our neighbors also knew what was going on. Some, it turns out, knew even more than I did. A year or so later, I would learn that my uncle was, in truth, my older brother. That my grandmother had adopted him and presented him to the world as hers when my mother got pregnant as a teenager.

After being stopped in the street that morning, things only got worse. Eventually, my grandmother demanded that my mother give over temporary custody of me and my siblings and go into rehab. You gotta do it, she pleaded. You gotta do it. You got to do it. I remember going to the currency exchange at 75th Street and Stony Island, next door to Jackson Park Hospital, and watching my mom get the paperwork notarized. I give custody of my children

For the first time in memory, I felt a bit of relief. This was a new chance for all of us. A chance that my mom would get the help she needed and things would be okay again. That my siblings and I would move to a safer environment, one farther away from the epicenter of the gangs and violence, where we wouldnt have to rely on government housing. A chance that wed have somebody whod actually look after us. That I had a future beyond my present.

But real change doesnt come easy. And that road to a better future would be tougher to walk than I could ever imagine.

MAYBE YOU DONT KNOW the South Side of Chicago. Maybe you know a little, that it can be rough and heartbreaking and oftentimes deadly.

I grew up in a house of addiction, poverty, government assistance, divorce, neglect, abandonment, and violence. This wasnt a unique experience in my neighborhood, or in neighborhoods like it across the United States. A lot of kids had mothers or friends or family on drugs. People willing to do anything to get more. Many had brothers in gangs or in jail. Sisters addled on crack. Fathers and boyfriends who vanishedor, worse, stuck around with only their fists.

There was a club at my school, and everyone knew who its members were. There was no hiding it. From the stink of your unwashed clothes to kids cracking jokes in the lunchroom about your mom or dad being an addict or worse. Some kids came to school with fresh bruises every week.

If you were in this club, other students would rip on you. This was to be expected, I suppose. But the teachers also looked at you differently. Not with empathy or even pity. More like, they looked through you. As if your future was already written on your dirty clothes, in your weary eyes, on your dark skin.

Of course, inner-city Chicago could also be quite beautiful. The sound of genuine laughter from front porches and street corners as people told stories or played the dozensa game in which two people square off in a friendly verbal war of insults. The sound of a choir on Sunday in a church that only held fifty. Kids playing basketball. Playing tag with friends, dashing past an open fire hydrant in July. Riding my bike all day past stores and getting ice cream from the ice cream truck on the rare days we could afford it.

I have genuine love for my hometown and roots. And, despite the hardships we faced, I grew up in a home of faith and hard work and prideful self-reliance.

But its also true that the bike from my memories was eventually stolen from me. A gang member plucked me off, set me aside, and pedaled off without a single word. I never saw that dude, or the bike, again. Its almost funny now. Almost.

Even as an adult, at times, when I passed through the South Side or visited it as part of some news story I was shooting, my whole chest would still clench. My stomach sometimes roiled and turned. It was the same genuine panic I felt as a kid whenever Id come back to the South Side after staying with my father or grandparents in a better neighborhood. Every time, every time, I was brought back to be with my mom, I was filled with palpable dread. Within inner-city Chicago, I could still fear the same danger and depression as before. Amplified by the fact that Id gotten out, even more aware. Sure, I can play it off well if Im on camera. Thats the job. But theres an echo from what I felt as a child.

I remember when I first managed to move out into an apartment of my own. Even then, my childhood was never more than a few blocks away. The empty lots, the people torn down and hopeless. And always knowing that this is where I came from. Yes, I felt great compassion for those still living in those circumstances. But the anxiety remained, maybe even grew during those days, because I never wanted to live like that again.

Today, I appear regularly on the most-watched news channel on earth. I run a successful consulting firm that makes good money and also makes the world a better place. Ive got apartments in L.A. and D.C. People say Ive come far.

I suppose theres truth to that. But I wrote this book to focus on an overlooked part of my perceived accomplishments. If Ive achieved beyond any statistical or cultural expectations, if Ive managed to play the cards dealt with some manner of success, its because: