from the #2 city
As a Michigander successfully transplanted in St. Louis, I watch the annual unveiling of “Most Dangerous City” (CQ Press) with particular interest. St. Louis dodged the bullet this year as the title went back to Detroit, the long heralded “Murder City USA”.
Admittedly I lived “out state” in Michigan, far from the legendary badlands of Detroit. In St. Louis, I now live in the “first ring” suburbs, relishing the delights of city life by day but tucked into bed in the ‘burbs. Having grown up in the shadow of the ’67 race riots, I was raised to be wary of “the city”. As forbidden fruit, I grew fascinated with what lie behind the towering brick facades. My singular trip as a teen to the downtown Hudson’s in Detroit is still a vibrant and cherished memory. The store is now long gone, but I delighted in St. Louis’ downtown Dillard’s outlet until it too closed. Living now close enough to touch and taste, I am even more enamored of what is so quickly labeled and dismissed.
These two cities, Detroit and St. Louis, are historic bedrock in America’s coming of age story. In these once teeming metropolis’ the immigrants swarmed and the factories churned.
As the factories closed and the incomes vanished, the workforce and the buildings where they labored were left behind. With no plan for recycling the buildings or the people,
the children and grandchildren and now great grandchildren of the workforce have no where to go. No longer needed in a post-industrial economy, they remain as a living witness to the human side of an economy now gone.
Driving the streets of East St. Louis recently, I decided that Dr. Seuss had painted the Oncler much too kindly in, “The Lorax”. In Seuss’ rendition, when the Oncler discovers the Truffula and his Thneeds, he calls his uncles and cousins to people the burgeoning machinery of industrialization. When the Truffula Trees are depleted, the Oncler waves goodbye to his family as the family leave to seek greener pastures and the Oncler himself is left in the wasteland. The Oncler’s real life counterparts were not nearly so kind. The real life Onclers left town before the alarm was even sounded, leaving the uncles and cousins and even the Lorax trapped. The real life Onclers did not understand themselves to be connected to the people upon whom they built their fortune. Indeed the people were discarded as carelessly as the machinery.
Listening to the announcement of this year’s prize, I remembered a professor that held me spellbound as a college freshman at Oakland University, the Michigan school that sat literally on the historic Dodge estate. The professor that captured my attention spoke in stark contrast to the ground of the industrialists. She introduced terms like “blue collar crime” and “white collar crime”. She challenged us to consider the different ways we prosecute the poor man who uses a gun to take an old woman’s wallet and the rich man who uses cunning to defraud her of her life savings.
To be sure the crimes of poverty are most prevalent where we find the poor. Given that my beloved cities now teem with poverty rather than production, the results are predictable. Both cities offer a full complement of troubling behaviors to mirror the rabid poverty. Too many under and un-employed adults, too many hungry children, and too many readily available guns are undeniably a recipe for fear. But I have to wonder wherein the problem lies – the poverty, the hopelessness, the weapons or some combination?
The “100 Neediest Cases” (St. Louis Post Dispatch) in St. Louis will begin this week and offer to us an important invitation to share charity. Charity, though essential, is but a band-aid on a wound that is deeply infected.