I live in a gentrifying neighborhood in Southeast Atlanta. It's a nice neighborhood. My neighbors are friendly, waving from the yard or stopping by to talk about the weather. The kids are kids, running around in packs probably up to no good, from the point of view of us adults. People dress up in their Sunday best for church. Gutters are cleaned, lawns mowed, cars washed, cookouts held. My elderly neighbor sits outside every day during baseball season and listens to the Atlanta Braves on the radio. On election day, my neighbors voted.
We're also suffering through a crime wave that is, at present, more annoying than anything (so far it's just stuff). There's a predictable amount of racial tension. There's an apartment development nearby that is always featured prominently in the weekly crime report. Drugs. Gunshots every night. Blinds pulled.
The thing is, it's a great neighborhood. The crime? Other than drug offenses and the occasional domestic violence report, most of the offenders are from neighborhoods far away. They're coming into our neighborhood to hit the obviously renovated homes and steal laptops and flat screen TVs. Most of the day to day problems in the neighborhood are the result of, oh, four or five people, plus the usual busted mailboxes and stolen ladders that are probably teenagers, based on the arrest reports. Even that awful apartment complex ... most of the residents are decent folks and the "bad element" is would fit comfortably in my (small) bathroom.
This diary isn't really about any of that though.
You see, the strange thing about my neighborhood isn't that it has problems. A diary about a big city neighborhood with problems would be about as interesting as a diary about Applebees. And it's not a diary about the nobility that is present in the neighborhood, the hard workers steadfastly defying everything to make a better world for their children. I have no doubt that that's here too.
No, the strange thing about my neighborhood is that it's exactly the same today as it was before the downturn happened. There may be a bit more unease here and there, mainly among the people like me who have moved into the neighborhood. And, really, it's not that strange a thing at all when I think about it.
This neighborhood is exactly the same because too many of the people here simply couldn't have fallen any farther, recession or otherwise. Unemployment, failing health care, terrible diets, what jobs we have are often temporary or completely inadequate for raising a family.
And still there are a lot of good people here. Despite everything.
I'm a fan of some way to solve the banking crisis. The one area where trickle down does work, in a sense, is that it takes money to start a business, to ease the perfectly normal ups and downs of any human society.
I'm a fan of fixing health care so that insurance is affordable.
I'm a fan of finding a meaningful solution to Iraq and Afghanistan. These are critical national goals.
I'm a fan of encouraging people to eat healthy food.
I'm a fan of building new bridges and light rail.
I'm a fan of funding a professional military and making sure the people who serve are treated with respect.
So ...
When it comes down to bickering over $165 billion or $1 trillion or $9 trillion, when it comes down to debating whether 17,000 more American soldiers will help Afghanistan, when it comes down to worrying about Supreme Court justices or Treasury secretaries, let's remember that these are profoundly important issues.
But ...
Let's also remember that there are tens of millions of Americans who need help in ways that we have barely begun to discuss on a national level. Sure, it's hard to focus on issues that are small individually even if they are immense in the aggregate. It's important to focus on the plight of the middle class that has been ravaged by thirty years of piss-poor policies.
But ...
There are neighborhoods where all the shovel-ready work in the world will not make a dent. So I guess it's up to us.
There are people here at Daily Kos who are working their asses off for the people this country too often forgets. You have my thanks and my immense respect. This isn't really an action diary though. If you're motivated to get up tomorrow and volunteer in a soup kitchen or donate clothes and cell phones to charities that help people with job interviews, that's great! Please keep doing it.
All those big issues a few paragraphs up: there's relatively little we can do about them right now. We can write letters, protest, debate on the Internet. All of these things are valuable to some extent.
Maybe I don't need to say this last part. Maybe it's self-evident to a community like this. I hope so. But I hope we keep in mind the millions of us who have been completely left behind by our society. These are people, human beings who love and laugh, who have families and churches and hobbies and dreams. So I won't say they have nothing. Far from it. But there's one thing too many Americans don't have: a chance. A chance to think about something I've thought about almost as a matter of routine in the past: changing careers, getting a different job, moving to a safer neighborhood with better schools. Too many Americans, white, black, Native American, Latino, and everybody else, are born, live, and die in a cycle of poverty and national neglect that is unforgivable in a country that claims to be the wealthiest, most just country in history.
I don't know what to do. I can volunteer, I can donate, and these things are good. But I can't even begin to wrap my brain around the systemic problems that we have to solve. It touches everything: jobs, education, crime, violence, drugs, transportation, fuel prices, trade policy, everything... and there's no quick fix.
So I come to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to this diary: What the fuck do we have to do to make a dent in poverty? We don't have to make everybody rich, but where do we begin to rebuild a huge chunk of our society that has been almost completely unserved by its government (despite the very best efforts of private citizens, charities, churches, and a blessed few members of our local, state, and national governments)?
I don't know where to start. To fix this damned thing, not just to treat it. I'm sure you'll have some good ideas in the comments, but all I'm going to do is to ask all of you to remember, to re-remember, that all of our Great Issues of the Day, as important as they are, are one facet of the challenges we face. If we come out of the downturn tomorrow, millions of Americans will be hungry, jobless, and feeling unsafe. Not just one health care crisis from bankruptcy, but so far from quality health care in the first place that it hardly bears thinking about. Not worrying about college loans, but suffering through schools so underfunded that even the best teachers can only keep a finger in the dam.
Where to start? The first step is remembering.