THE MOTOR CITY
Few cities across the American landscape portray in more desperate detail, the ruins left behind when an entire area survives on a single industry, and then the industry goes away. Like the steel towns of Pennsylvania, the paper towns of Northern New Hampshire and so many others, it is the darker side of American Industry that often gets left to the shadows. The auto industry made Detroit, indeed, much of Michigan. As American automakers finally suffocated under the weight of union bosses, gasping for breath and building junk while Japanese automakers left them pinging and popping on the shoulder of the auto business highway. Then there is the true darkness of what is left behind, and the people left behind who come to know the true depths of the word "gone". At this time of year, for those of us more fortunate, it is incumbent on us to give pause to what is happening to other countrymen in corners we don't want to look in.
I have been to Detroit, just a few years ago for the Super-Bowl. In the extreme downtown area you would never know anything is wrong. There are still prominent buildings there from The Big Three. Spotless skyscrapers holding vigil to a time that is mostly passed. Yet, venture off the beaten path at all, and things are truly decrepit. My father-in-law got his pocket-picked while leaving the football game. Not an easy task to pull over on an Italian guy who grew up on the streets of Hoboken, New Jersey. As we left the stadium, we got lost and drove through areas that literally looked like a warzone. It seems as though it is all neatly swept to the outskirts so that it need not be seen by anyone clever enough to not get lost. Just a few weeks ago, a story appeared that, as shocking as it is, it's really just another day on the streets in Detroit.
A gunman opened fire on Seliethia Parker while she was driving her SUV with her 7 year old daughter Alexis Goggins in the back seat. The young girl lunged over the seat to protect her mother and took 7 gunshots to the face. She is still in critical condition, blind in one eye, her 30 year old mother has been released, suffering two gunshot wounds. The little girl is being heralded as a hero, and she is, but in another way she's just another kid growing up in unbearable circumstances in an actual Hellhole of a city, trying to save what is probably the only relatively sane thing in her existence. Her mother.
face="Arial">The shooter, not surprisingly, was her mother's ex-boyfriend. Calvin Tillie, 29, an ex-convict, out on parole. Where have I heard that before? The whole affair is repeated everyday, on countless streets and doesn't begin to account for what goes on behind closed doors that we never hear about. It's just a damn sad state of affairs, and as Christmas approaches I count my blessings, quite literally, for where and how I live and knowing full well that had I been born into any one of those desperate places, that there but for the Grace of God go I. I don't know how we could ever fix it. I don't know if we ever would fix it. In the midst of a Presidential campaign which mostly focuses on the mundane and the routine, there is a cancer growing through our country that nobody wants to talk about. And, like a cancer, you can't fix it 'till you know it's there, and you'll never know it's there if you don't look.
|