I live in a neighborhood where music, often loudly played, expresses violence, cursing, and misogyny as life’s normality. It is blasted by young boys on bicycles with attached speaker trailers, cars zooming down or parked on my residential street, or people in their homes, blasting the music for everyone within a two block radius to hear.
Listening to my personal music collection gives me hope and inspiration or makes me dance with glee until I realize that I am no longer the twenty-something who could move my body non-stop until the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes, positive phrases from my songs’ lyrics pop up without command when I’m in a tough situation. I wonder what pops up in the minds of those who listen to gangsta rap or other music, games, videos, or other media that promote chaos instead of peace.
Although I cannot prove a connection, I witness behavior and speech that appears to match the music played publicly in my neighborhood. The other day, I was pulling weeds from my yard. A man walked by and told me that I was working too hard. He suggested that I just “set fire to it.”
A death on the block caused the entire street to be completely taken over for a couple of weeks by people coming to pay their respects. They blocked driveways, double parked, opened car trunks that became open bars. They ate, drank, smoked, and openly sold or exchanged drugs. Kids ran and played like they were at a county fair, picking up bottles of alcohol like toys, using the contents to water lawns that weren’t theirs. Trash was left in the street and on private property. The aforementioned loud music was played until well after dark, when the police finally showed up to shut the partying down.
None of this is seen as abnormal or disrespectful. Residents’ rights or comfort are not considered. Requests to move cars and pick up trash and bottles are met with hostility. I think the music affirms and supports a generational culture of thinking and behavior that feeds dysfunction, limitation, crime, and mental, physical, emotional, and social dis-ease. This is how some people live. This is how they like to live and how they are comfortable living. And all of the laws and government programs trying to address racism, income and other inequality, health care, crime, and whoever’s life matters will have a short-term impact until whatever is going on inside of people is transformed, especially as regards the children.
On June 24, 2016, NPR (National Public Radio) published a story entitled “Invisibilia: Is Your Personality Fixed, or Can You Change Who You Are?” by Alix Spiegel. Pivotal studies were performed by psychologist Walter Mischel who found that there was no consistency in personality. His tests showed that people will easily change their behavior if they reframe their interpretations of situations in which they find themselves.
For example, four to five year old children were told that if they didn’t eat a given cookie or marshmallow, they would receive two more when the tester returned. As soon as they were alone, the children gobbled down the cookie. However, when the children were told to imagine that the cookie didn’t exist, they didn’t eat the cookie. By changing the representation, the behavior changed.
Another psychologist, Lee Ross, determined that personality and behavior are consistent when we find ourselves in consistent situations. This thinking corresponded with testing in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the concepts of conformity and authority. People repeatedly obeyed orders to torture others because they believed that the situation required that conduct. To Ross, this proved that people are predictable in situations where their behavior is constrained by roles and relationships within those situations.
Demonstrating that it is possible to reconfigure one’s personality, the article included the story of a man imprisoned for committing a horrific crime as a violent sexual predator, a behavior perpetuated in prison. While beating “the stupid” out of his best friend, a fellow inmate, he had an epiphany and changed in that instant. That was the last time he was physically violent. He said that it took two years to change his personality. He began by physically isolating himself and quit hanging out with a group of guys who didn’t conform to the different person he wanted to be: “less aggressive, less impulsive, more conscientious.” He became an entirely different human being. “The person who committed the crime no longer exists.”
The article concluded by quoting and rephrasing statements by psychologist Mischel: “Traits and life situations both affect our behavior. But so do our minds. The beliefs, assumptions, expectations [received] from friends, family, culture . . . are the filter through which you see the world. Your mind stands between who you are, your personality, and whatever situation you are in. It interprets the world around it, and how it feels about what it sees. And so when the . . . mind changes, the person changes.”
This is the key to transforming a block, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country, and, ultimately, the world. Something within the individual must want and decide to change.