“Our Stolen Generation: Brenda”

 By: J. Thomas Hunter

High On Crack Street (pic 1)

“High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell” is a documentary from 1993 that tells the story of a group of crack users living in Lowell, Massachusetts.[1] It follows 3 people; Brenda, Boo-Boo and Dickie; as they engage in criminal and immoral acts to score crack and smoke themselves into a stupor in any of the various drug dens that litter the former manufacturing city. It was featured most prominently in the 2010 movie, “The Fighter,” which was about a boxer who was trying to get out from under the shadow of his more accomplished brother and trainer, Dickie. Though Dickie was a central character of “The Fighter,” he played only a minor role in “High on Crack Street” and is not a factor at all in this article. Instead, the documentary and this article focuses on Brenda—the sympathetic addict who offers surprisingly lucid insight on the issue of human life.

Brenda is rail thin. Her front teeth, to the extent that they even exist, are badly damaged or blackened. Her rubbery, wrinkled skin distorts her face to the point where her age is practically impossible to ascertain within reason simply by looking at her. Brenda’s pleading, glassy eyes, however, reveal a human soul—a woman, trapped—deep inside the shell of a reasonless beast.

Boo-boo, her on-again off-again boyfriend, periodically doubles as her pimp so that the two can earn enough money to buy more crack. A prostitute’s life is a harsh one—marked by violence, denigration, a broken heart and of course, unwanted pregnancy.

Brenda (pic2)

Shortly after the documentary opens, Brenda hits the streets looking for johns. Despite her ragged appearance—typical of prostitutes—she finds takers and earns a few hundred dollars which she spends entirely on crack. She appears one morning afterward on her way to Planned Parenthood—convinced that she is pregnant again. She has no children, and admits openly to the documentarian that she is not a stranger to abortion. After the clinic workers determine that she is, indeed, pregnant, Brenda considers the paternal possibilities and the options available to her. By her calculus, her child’s father could be Boo-boo, Mike (an ex-boyfriend—also a junky), or any one of the anonymous johns she serviced during her nights of drug-crazed desperation.

In a moment of clarity, Brenda considers the kind of life that her offspring could have being born of an uneducated, drug-addicted prostitute who lives in squalor and destitution. The prospect is hardly rosy. Her own family advises her to abort her baby, an option that would force her to hit the streets again, repeatedly dejecting herself, to earn the money for the actual abortion. Despite years of Brenda frying her brain cells and living a life of utter moral depravity, she completely understands and vocalizes that abortion is murder—and gravely wrong.

“I know how much pain and mental suffering I went through when I was fifteen,” she says, referring to her first abortion. “I murdered my baby! I murdered my baby! And here I am, I’m going to do it again. I think it’s selfish.”

After vacillating over whether or not to abort her child—leaning ever heavily on the side of life, but succumbing to crack as she deals with the stress of her decision, she enters into drug rehab in an attempt to clean up her life.

In so doing, she leaves her friends behind. She leaves the HIV-infected Boo-boo, who worked only to keep her a slave to crack. She leaves Lowell, a city ravaged by destitution. In spite of her best efforts, though, she still can’t leave her addiction. In fact, Brenda dies—after delivering her baby. 

Baby (pic3)

Indeed, the life of a drug-addicted prostitute is tragic. How striking it is, though, that Brenda, considered by most standards of a functioning society to be merely a semi-sentient, flesh bag of bones and blood, understood that the life of her child had immense worth. Her child, “doomed” to be born into a Hell on Earth, deserved an advocate—his/her own mother.

Contrast her view to that of America’s most elite members of society who use people like Brenda as examples that justify abortion on demand.

People of immense wealth—especially in comparison to Brenda—support abortion because they predict that a child born to someone like her would be better off dead. The arrogance that leads one to predict that a life yet lived could be worse than death itself is astonishing, however a staple of pro-choice rhetoric.

Despite all of her demons, Brenda understood that killing a defenseless child is simply wrong. Having never spent a day in college, her moral clarity on this issue had finally evolved beyond that of her would-be professors and indoctrinated classmates. Brenda, in all of her awesome tragedy, chose morality—life—against the instincts of her “intellectual superiors.”

Article Sources:

---

[1] http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/high_on_crack_street_lost_lives_in_lowell

Photo Sources: "Pic1" fromhttp://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0zH912eX0_8/TQGPzFebCaI/AAAAAAAAALI/S0qe_DSKN3E/s1600/High%2Bon%2BCrack%2BStreet%2B1995%2BHBO%2BDocumentary%2B720x4802.jpg; "Pic2" from  http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/131/934/131934589_640.jpg; "Pic3" from http://www.waterbirthbaby.com/gallery/0/baby-photo-shoot-3.jpg