Walking around trying to make a bus system work in a suburban, predominately conservative community on the tail end of the great recession brings one across a landscape and culture in transition. Here is what is out there now and what the beginnings of change, good and bad, look like.
This was published in the Moultrie News, our weekly paper today. I consider myself lucky to be someone who still gets to see his words printed on paper. It's a great privilege and I attempt to earn it every week.
Even in quiet, conservative East Cooper, a new world is coming.
For the past three weeks other community volunteers and I have been working our way across the East Cooper area, from Islands to Inland, engaging the community in the CARTA 541 effort. A new bus route system is planned for our area, but to support the additional cost of reaching most of the community, 541 additional riders a week are needed.
We’ve been working with businesses, nonprofit groups, churches, schools and government to find a plan which reaches that goal. If that plan comes together this Thursday evening at the Darby Building at 7 pm, we should get the routes we want. If the plan works and puts people on the busses, these new routes will survive CARTA’s competitive evaluation process six and twelve months later.
Linda Page of Mt. Pleasant Town Council and the CARTA board and other community leaders know there is no substitute for walking around talking to people when community has to work. It’s a process which hasn’t changed since the rise of representative politics. You could find people on the streets of Athens or Rome talking up plans and inviting people to meetings over two thousand years ago. Printing, telephones, radio, television, email, internet, Face book and YouTube haven’t made this obsolete. Jesus did most of his ministry this way. Right now, in the troubled streets and squares of revolutionary Egypt and at the most buttoned down Chamber of Commerce project, people are walking around talking to other people. That’s what we were doing in Mt. Pleasant last week.
Such work takes middle aged men like myself into lacy pink stores full of little girls dresses that men without daughters would never otherwise see. Parents of teenagers carried clipboards into empty Gymboree playrooms 12 years after their children grew out of romping to Barney music. I’ve seen the inside of a sport bar kitchen, yoga studio and a quiet toy store doing January inventory after Santa has come and gone.
There is no doubt that the economic contraction which has ravaged our area has left its mark. I saw plenty of empty buildings, for lease signs and a few going out of business sales. The busiest clothing store in Mt. Pleasant is now Goodwill in the Sea Island shopping center. It will soon have more competition as a large new store offering to buy, sell or trade clothing for teenagers opens on Johnnie Dodds Blvd.
Young people, who would have been buying their first home and driving to it in a new Pontiac in 1970, are now riding bicycles to coffee shops to pound out internet code as contract workers whose only benefit is a weekly EFT and annual 1099 form. I saw a sewing shop where the worn tables showed long use and an enduring culture of people who could make and fix things. I met more people on the buses we have running now than anyone in the car dominated world of East Cooper 1970 could have imagined.
However, it wasn’t all bad or hard. I walked in on a grand opening sale in a cluster of new shops on Coleman Blvd where inexpensive Champaign was being served on the owner’s birthday, a moment of genuine joy. I talked with people building a new Juanita Greenberg’s Nacho restaurant next to a busy Andolini’s and across from a packed Boulevard Diner.
The Village Playhouse, our community theater, was selling out shows. There were bakeries full of the scent of fresh cupcakes and cookies. Real estate agents told me people were buying. Contractors showed me plans ready to build. Schools boasted about test scores and graduates. The senior citizens center roared with full activity rooms on Saturday morning.
In many of these places, I met people who recognized that the world of waste, borrow and throw it away was over. Like it or not, they’re ready to try a world of save, reuse, recycle and conserve it. Many of them are ready to try making at least a few of their trips in the bus, by bicycle or on foot.
The East Cooper area is in much better shape to adapt to such a world than many other places. Our governments, while struggling with budget issues, aren’t broke. We retain an energetic, diverse population connected across a spectrum of institutions and economies. Our public schools remain strong and well led. While there are still significant gaps here for people who want to walk or ride a bike, there is a lot more bike path and sidewalk out there than there was a decade ago. Our CARTA 541 project builds on efforts like the Coleman Blvd. plan, Central Mount Pleasant and Waterfront Memorial Park.
We’ll disagree and we won’t get all that we ask for, but the economy is clearly reviving. The community has survived. If you walk around and talk to people East of the Cooper, you can see it. That is a good thing to know.
Full information on the CARTA 541 Effort for East Cooper can be found at http://tinyurl.com/... online.