BMJ  2005;330:51 (1 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7481.51

reviews

PERSONAL VIEW

The ballad of the poor, young male

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Elvis Presley's song "In the Ghetto" always brings a lump to my throat. For the uninformed, the song's theme is the cycle of violence in which young black men in Chicago in the 1960s were trapped. It is the emotional inflection of Elvis's voice that moves me, which is odd, as he was a poor white southerner and so can't have known what life was like in the urban slums. My wife suggests that my sentimentality is borne of eating too much quiche in the 1980s and desperately juggling a small baby while shirtless.

In the song a mother finds her young son dead, "face down on the street with a gun in his hand"—sad stuff. The song is 40 years old, but in Glasgow this futility continues relentlessly, our young men dying in street violence. If not killed, many are beaten, "slashed," or stabbed, and on most nights . . . [Full text of this article]

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Glasgow destwo@yahoo.co.uk

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Rapid Responses:

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Ballad of the jaded colleague

Sol Ridgeback
bmj.com, 1 Jan 2005 [Full text]

Re: Ballad of the jaded colleague

N Green
bmj.com, 2 Jan 2005 [Full text]

Itīs only rock īnī roll...

Daniel Nowak
bmj.com, 4 Jan 2005 [Full text]

Ballad of the rich, young male

Paul S Mcloughlin
bmj.com, 5 Jan 2005 [Full text]

Please Sir, more liberals

J.P O'Donnell
bmj.com, 5 Jan 2005 [Full text]

Despair, duty and deliverance.

Woody Caan
bmj.com, 6 Jan 2005 [Full text]

The ballad of the poor, young male

Stephen A Taylor
bmj.com, 10 Jan 2005 [Full text]

No advocate?

Sally L Read
bmj.com, 18 Jan 2005 [Full text]