Numerology

By Ed Piper

I intentionally did not title my post with the name of the club, but San Diego's new NASL soccer team just named itself "1904", which would strike any of my former juvenile court teaching colleagues as at least having a whiff of gang smell to it.

You see, in certain neighborhoods and in certain circles, identities are formed--mostly for bad--around symbols derived from the letters of the alphabet.

For example, when Reggie Bush, he of Helix football game, wore "619" on his under-eye swatches as a USC football player, some people back home took it as other than a moniker denoting his home territory. Reggie Bush wasn't, and isn't, a gang member, and I don't mean to imply anything of the kind.

But the use of numbers like that are used to demarcate territory and to hurt those who cross these boundary lines among far too many people.

"1904", for the uninitiated, stands for "S", the 19th letter in the alphabet, and "D", the fourth letter in the alphabet. It's kind of hip, it's kind of edgy. Yes, the club owners can maintain that they don't have any gang connotations in mind.

On the other hand, many of my students hurt and were hurt over numbers like that. I could never get my students to reveal what the number "34" stood for.

But many other numbers were readily discoverable. "SSD", as in South San Diego, can be rendered 191904.

Just to show the stupidity and limited thinking associated with this letter/number system, "14", which you would see scratched in property in Northern California if you lived there, represents gangs in the northern part of the state--the connection being the letter "N", the 14th letter of the alphabet.

Then, with no creativity involved at all, "13" becomes the number for Southern California gangs, only because it is a number next to 14. Now, isn't that dumb?

There are many other combinations, and I don't care to bring attention or recognition to them, because in a gang context, they only mean bad. There is nothing good about a gang of low-self-esteem young people who prey on others, who use drugs to hide from their troubles, and who live in a  lot of fear of growing and moving out from their parochial perspectives on the world at large.

Not all my students fit this description. Many were successful, and they made the grade by fighting for something better in their life through hard work.

Never glamorize gang culture. It is insidious; it thrives on fear; there is nothing life-giving about it.