CARLTON FLETCHER: Sometimes the easy way is just too hard to resist

All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks, you better run, better run, outrun my gun.

— Foster the People

The response was a common one.

Discussing a recent news report about a promising young athlete who’d wound up in jail after being connected to gang and illegal drug activities, the general consensus among a group of average, middle-class citizens in their 50s was, “Why would he do it? Why would this young man screw up a promising future for what is, at best, short-term gratification and, at worst, a death sentence?”

I continued to think about that young man after the discussion moved to the haplessness of the Atlanta Falcons, thought about how his arrest had devastated his family and, to a lesser degree, the community that cheered his athletic exploits. I thought about his role reversal from big man on campus hero to statistic. Another young man who’ll be swallowed up by America’s criminal justice system.

Mostly, though, I kept coming back to that seemingly rhetorical question: Why?

I don’t personally know this young man, nor do I know anything about him or his family other than what I gleaned from news reports I’ve read. But it’s not too hard, really, to come up with a working theory of why he, and thousands of others like him, find themselves in similar circumstances.

The young man’s family is poor. News reports say he never knew his father and it’s simple enough to imagine the trappings of the kind of life he lived. In fact, it’s become almost cliche. A poor kid sees his friends and school classmates with all the things kids place so much value on nowadays: the newest generation of cellphone with all its incumbent bells and whistles, the latest fashions, a nice vehicle.

The only people from his neighborhood who have these things are the ones who opted for the quick fix. They’re the ones who laughed at peers who spent free time studying or working at minimum-wage jobs in an attempt to stake a claim to their portion of the American Dream. These budding criminals go to school only for the connections they make and don’t really care that they read on a grammar school level.

At the end of the day, this group is the one riding around in flashy cars, wearing sharp new clothes.

Wanting nice things is not restricted to poor families living on the fringes of society. Middle-class kids might have all the necessities of life, but their families rarely have expendable income for the extras. And even the status-hungry kids from families that live comfortably find themselves eager to keep up with peers who are given every new do-dad fad the moment it is released.

Those of us — rich, poor, middle class, black, white, brown — who either followed the positive directives of parents, religious leaders, teachers or others with influence in our lives or decided for ourselves that we would not take the shortcut or the illegal route to get what we wanted in life find it difficult to understand how someone would take the other path.

But if you’ve never had any of the finer things in life and someone offers them to you on a silver platter — you just have to get involved in a little unsavory business — it takes a much stronger will to say no than it does to say yes. Throw in the fact, as was the case with this young athlete, that you had no male role model in the home and a mother who spent most of her time working to support her family, and the recipe is there.

Certainly neither I nor anyone else with walking-around sense is offering an excuse for young people who make the fateful decision to take the easy way in life, the way that garners them headlines for criminal behavior rather than gridiron glory. America may be flawed, but it is still the land of opportunity for those willing to go after their dreams. Success stories of modern-day heroes who have overcome monumental obstacles are everywhere.

But, sadly, so are stories like the one of the young athlete who chose to do things the easy way and now finds himself locked in a cage rather than running with a football on Friday nights. We may never fully comprehend the circumstances that led him to that place in life where he chose wickedness as a shortcut. But I think we have a pretty good guess as to why.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.