When I was growing up as a poor black child in my hometown of Denver, I went to a local elementary school called Wyatt. It was a grand Victorian era building that reminded one more of a hotel than a grade school, with a great, big rotunda featuring a hardwood floor, collonades and a steepled ceiling. I loved going into that building every day...I think even as a seven and eight year old, I realized that most school buildings were not like this.
I would actually walk the three blocks to the school every day by myself. The neighborhood was run down, but there were small neighborhood stores (always run by Middle Easterners), small row-style apartments and single family homes that dated back to the 1920s and 30s. There was graffiti and trash everywhere, but when I was going to Wyatt the only crime you ever heard about was the occasional break-in, stolen car or--every once in a great while--an assault. I never wasted time going to and from school, but I never felt like my life was in danger.
I lived in this neighborhood until I was 18, all the way through high school. I was one of the last generation of Denver school kids to live through court-ordered busing, so after elementary school I never again went to a school close to my neighborhood. My high school was 13.5 miles one way from my house, but with the help of understanding parents, a dad who went out of his way for me and friends with cars, I still managed to join a host of afterschool activities such as newspaper, student council and the trivia bowl team (yeah, I was a nerd). But every day I would come back home and the changes in the neighborhood from when I was a little boy would definitely be very clear to me. When I was at Wyatt, there was no crack and only some teenage pregnancy. By my senior year of high school, I was riding to graduation with a known crack dealer and two of my peers who lived across the street were 16 and 18 year old girls with infants. I was born before Crips and Bloods...by my senior year, half the black kids in the neighborhood were Crips. This was a difference of just ten years. I couldn't believe the changes and it didn't seem like there was any way to slow things down.
This summer I visited the old neighborhood one day. Nobody I remembered was still there. My old house (long abandoned after the death of first my mother, then her sister) was boarded up although vagrants had frequently broken into it over the years. Almost as a mockery, the old vacant lot that used to be next door to my house was now occupied by a brand new, incongrously clean single-family house. There were signs of gentrification down the street, but the old school was now an underused, underfunded community center and my block felt like a scene from Eminem's 8 MILE.
What's the point of this long and winding recollection? Maybe there isn't one. Maybe sometimes it's just good to sit down and reflect. Or maybe this country has a hundred neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. They're not all as bleak as the blighted West Baltimore of HBO's THE WIRE, but there are far too many of them and Americans who don't live in these neighborhoods close their eyes and hold their nose. There's a hundred mini-Katrinas out there, a hundred mini-9th Wards and there's no telethon for them, no government looking to launch a massive program to bail them out and only a few underfunded, understaffed philanthropic organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Para Los Ninos trying to do anything to help.
I'm going to go back, some day soon and try to help. But I wonder if myself and others like me are like the proverbial Dutch boy with our fingers in the dike.
We're all neck deep in the water.
Peace...
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