... and sometimes a parent or teacher thinks it would much easier on everyone if they just punched a hole in the wall or threw a wastebasket.

I know I have.



The difficult part isn't telling people what they "should" do; anyone can do that since everyone has opinions how to best get along in this world. The difficult part is simply listening, even as you are being eviscerated by angry words.

Privileged white males in the U.S.A. have a bad habit of telling everyone else what they "should" do. Cops in the U.S.A. are even worse.

If I was emperor of this nation I'd fire three-quarters of the cops and completely disarm three-quarters of those remaining. Let them solve problems with their words, and leave the weapons to those few saintly individuals who would sooner take a bullet than kill someone.

... I learned some valuable skills along the way.

I later got jobs fixing up crappy student housing that had been abused by other angry and lost young people.

However this turns out in rough Baltimore, it's probably not going to end up creating jobs or educational opportunities in the local community. The repair and cleanup work will go to well-connected outsiders, just as the police jobs do, emphasizing once again to the people of the community that the more powerful "polite" society considers them both useless and dangerous.

Fuck polite.

"Please, sir, may I have another bowl of your shit?"

There's plenty of work to be done in the U.S.A.. If the private sector cannot provide good jobs for people, our governments must. And if government wants to know what kind of work and what kind of educational opportunities a community desperately needs, then the experts are the people who actually live in a community, not some self-righteous asshole living in an entirely different universe, fully insulated from many rougher realities of life.