A few years ago, Gregory Welsh, one of thousands of drug addicts in Baltimore, took a trip to a residential treatment center in County Tipperary with the hopes of beating his addiction. He went to Ireland with an evangelical Christian group devoted to helping people reach recovery. Welsh, who had a poet's heart and had written a lot of verse during his long struggle with crack cocaine, experienced a spiritual awakening.
He learned he could live without drugs; he saw how a change in surroundings and friends could be a good thing in his life.
And he found God in the Irish soil.
The days at the treatment center were structured; part of each called for those in treatment to do chores. Welsh worked in the garden. One day, while digging there, he turned up an old crucifix.
You can imagine how powerful the moment was for a weary 32-year-old man with a poet's heart and a crack addiction.
Today being Sunday, and tomorrow being St. Patrick's Day, I would like to tell you how this epiphany saved Gregory Welsh. But that's not so.
His spiritual adviser told me that, soon after Gregory Welsh returned to Baltimore from Ireland in 2006, he went back to the streets to score crack.
By the time I came in on this story, he was dead.
In October 2006, Welsh was shot to death by a drug dealer over money, and a police detective told me the amount in dispute might have been as little as $10. This happened in front of Welsh's parents' home in Northeast Baltimore. He fell on his parents' porch.
It's a common story: Man goes into treatment. Man relapses. Man gets into a deal for drugs. Deal goes bad. Gun comes out. We have a lot of guns in Baltimore, and drugs, and people with criminal records.
Eighty percent of the city's 275 murders in 2006 involved people with criminal records, both the killers and their victims. Some people are comforted by this; it makes them feel safer. The heartless and cynical consider it a tolerable condition - a way of decreasing the surplus population of criminals and losers.
But, as bad as conditions are here, that's not how we do things. We still consider each human life valuable, far more than $10. We study and struggle with this mess in our midst not because of the harm it does to Baltimore's image but because human lives are wasted.
So we have in the sad story of Gregory Welsh the challenge of Yeats - to "hold in a single thought reality and justice."
