Living for Change: Detroit, City of Hope
by Grace Lee Boggs
"We need to redefine and recreate
ourselves as active citizens rather than as consumers and producers."
This article first appeared in the Michigan Citizen.
It is a complex fate to be a Detroiter.
On the one hand, we can bewail the hardships of living in a city abandoned by
industry and supermarkets, depopulated by white and middle class flight, where
public transportation barely exists and 300 or more people are killed by
gunfire every year.
Or we can seize the opportunity to begin living simpler, healthier and more
environmentally-friendly lives, which will not only help alleviate the
planetary emergency but also begin creating the new concept of active
citizenship called for in these worst and best of times.
For example, do we keep hoping that supermarkets will return so that we can buy
additives-contaminated foods trucked into the city by gas-guzzlers? Or do we
support the community garden network that is already producing healthy food and
reducing neighborhood blight, and expand it into a local economy with greenhouses, canning plants, and
neighborhood food markets?
Do we continue to depend on the police and barred doors and windows to protect
us from crime and violence? Or do we spend more time on our front porches and
on our streets, looking out for our children and each other, biking instead of
driving SUVs, working together on recycling and other environmental projects
and, by bringing the neighbor back into the ‘hood, transforming our
communities into Peace and Safety Zones?
"It is up
to us to begin creating schools that engage our children from K-12 in
community-building, getting their cognitive juices flowing as they transform
their surroundings and themselves."
Do we continue to look on helplessly as 30-50% of our children drop out of
schools? Or do we recognize that our schools are now dysfunctional because they
were structured a hundred years ago for the industrial age which has come to an
end? Now it is up to us to begin creating schools that engage our children from
K-12 in community-building, getting their cognitive juices flowing as they
transform their surroundings and themselves, planting community gardens,
organizing
neighborhood arts and health festivals, painting public murals, learning from
practice which has always been the best way to learn.
Do we continue to permit our young people to be incarcerated because they have
drifted into drugs and petty crimes out of joblessness and hopelessness? Or do
we organize Restorative Justice programs that provide opportunities for
dialogue between non-violent offenders and community members, so that together we can discover ways and means to
reintegrate our young people into our families and communities?
When we meet someone new these days, we usually ask: "What do you do?" In other
words, what is your job?. We have allowed ourselves to be reduced to jobholders
and consumers who define one another by our jobs, the clothes we wear or the
cars we drive.
Accepting this economic/materialistic view of ourselves was understandable in
the 19th and early 20th centuries when rapid economic and technological
development was necessary to produce material abundance.
However, now that we are overwhelmed with consumer goods, our urgent need is to
become active citizens, accepting continuing responsibility for our
communities, our cities, our country, our world and our planet, including
the responsibility for creating meaningful work for everyone, work that not
only produces goods and services but is ecologically-friendly and develops our
skills, gifts and citizenship.
"Our urgent
need is to become active citizens, accepting continuing responsibility for our
communities, our cities, our country, our world and our planet."
If we want to be safe from petty criminals as well as global terrorists, we
need to redefine and recreate ourselves as active citizens rather than as
consumers and producers.
Detroit City of Hope is
beginning this redefinition on a local level.
In the first half of 2007 we organized two events to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of MLK's anti-Vietnam war speech and of the Detroit Rebellion.
Based on what we learned from these two events, DCOH is now embarking on a five
year campaign to support and expand a network of the individuals and
organizations already engaged in activities to rebuild Detroit from the ground
up.
We will be launching this campaign on Saturday, October 6, at a meeting
co-hosted by The Gathering for
Justice, the organization founded by Harry Belafonte to struggle against
the criminalization and incarceration of our young people.
The meeting will be at YouthVille, 7375 Woodward Ave., from 9-4 p.m. Lunch will
be served.
Our aim is for everyone to leave with a deeper commitment to rebuild and
respirit Detroit because we have become more aware of how we each can
contribute to this goal.
Grace
Lee Boggs has been a political activist for more than 60 years.
Contact her through the Detroit City of Hope website.
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