Its 12:50 pm
Looking outside at our first real snowfall of the season...feeling a little funky today,sluggish. Of course this mean I need some coffee so after I post this,I better get on that.
I asked on my FB wall how people define "community". You hear the word tossed around all the time,especially in Detroit. After just about every event,especially the bad ones,you'll hear about how "the community needs to come together". But what exactly does that mean? A community as I understand it to me means sharing a same goal and sharing what resources you have to get and attain such goals. And the folks who work towards the SAME goal are then a community.
So think about that a minute. Are we really ever a community in the same sense? No,not really,we are far too splintered for a true one community,even in our own cities. Its almost like a modern day Tower of Babel where everyone while trying for a common goal cannot reach because they can't understand each other.
Same here...watching the city of Detroit while siting 30 miles from it is like watching the Tower trying to be built. Every time there seems to be progress,the goals of the many communities clash and the Tower falls...every single damn time.
There is no community in this city,even the most important thing it has,its children,are not enough to bond the communities together to strive for a better place for them. Instead you see them dying,getting pregnant,landing in jail,destroying their neighborhoods with blight and poverty (a community in itself).
The so called civic leaders are corrupt,consumed with naked greed and power and only are interested in keeping THEIR community as tight as possible,only room for a certain few.
Detroit is a perfect example of what it must have been when the Tower was being built,trying to attain that one goal and then falling apart at the seams with death,destruction,immorality and genocide as its new glue.
And just as in the days gone by,the citizens have scattered...down from a major city of 2 million to a decaying rotting leper colony of over 700,000 and probably just as many non-communities. Small beacons of hope are no counted as groups as much as individual people trying to link up with another soul...to try and once again to build a community. Will it ever happen? Some folks think "yes" and they point to several examples of real growth.
I have lived here over 12 years watching the same city these folks have and I can tell you,I sadly don't see it.
Every time Detroit gets someone with real ideas or talks real community building,either they are lying or they get lynched by others who ideas they feel are the ones. Instead of comparing the same blueprint for hope,they insist that either THEIR ideas lead the way or once again,the Tower will fall.....and fall....and so on....
Thoughts?
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