From Word To Word

This past Saturday was a busy one for our family.  We spent the morning at the Speed River Cleanup, an annual event where volunteers pull a year’s worth of garbage out of our local river.  We spent the afternoon with some friends who came to visit, the kids playing in the back yard while the parents were chatting over soup preparation.  We spent the evening watching The Boys of Baraka for this month’s Dinner and a Doc and eating the soup we had made that afternoon.

As I was going to sleep that night, I found myself reflecting on these neighbourhood activities and on how deeply they contrasted with those of the urban Baltimore neighbourhoods that were portrayed in Boys of Baraka, where life is dominated by poverty, crime, addiction, and violence.  Now, I recognize the complex of factors, both past and present, that have produced and perpetuated these urban neighbourhoods, and I recognize also that the question of how to renew these communities is difficult in the extreme, politically and economically and logistically.  It involves providing adequate learning, employment, and health to a massive number of people living in densely populated and poverty stricken areas.  It involves overcoming a long established culture of hopelessness, addiction, and violence.  It involves addressing the effects of the slavery, exploitation, racism, and classism that has been perpetrated over several hundred years.  It involves, in other words, alleviating the by-products of a capitalism, democracy, protestantism, industrialism, and nationalism gone horribly wrong.

Traditional approaches to this problem are often of the institutional and programmatic sort: a restructuring of the grossly inequitable education funding formula, a publicly funded and easily accessible health system, a massive rebuilding of infrastructure, widereaching retraining initiatives, consistent support of local businesses, a landscaping program to replace concrete with parks and gardens, free and accessible addiction counselling and rehabilitation centers, free and accessible family conflict counselling.  Though many of these initiatives would be beneficial, I think, and though some of them are absolutely necessary for a viable future in urban neighbourhoods, all of them would require a staggering level of financial, political, and logistical commitment.

The very limited attempts that have been already made to revitalize urban neighbourhoods, such as those in New York, have shown some success, but only at tremendous cost to governments and to charitable organizations.  The resources simply do not exist to implement these kinds of initiatives on the scale that is required.  It may possible to send twenty boys to a school in Kenya or to make other limited interventions, and these things are valuable in their way, but it is not possible, not through traditional institutional and programmatical means at least, to fund or support these kinds of programs on a scale that have any realistic hope of changing urban communities.

The real problem, therefore, is not how to change the culture of urban neighbourhoods, or of any other neighbourhood for that matter.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods without the resources to make large scale institutional interventions, even if everyone could agree on what these interventions should be.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods through other means, and I confess that I am not sure what these means would be.

I can only suggest, from the perspective of someone obviously unqualified to make any suggestion at all, that we need to imagine a renewal of community that proceeds, not from institution or from government, even if these things are involved to a certain extent, but from human relation.  What if people formed sharing and bartering cooperatives to help alleviate their low incomes?  What if they provided homeschooling or afterschool learning groups to help supplement the poorly funded schools?  What if they developed community gardens on balconies and on rooftops to help provide food?  What if they organized community programs to get people safely out of their homes and away from their televisions?

I know that none of this would be easy, and I know that none of this would be without risk, but it seems to me that these are the only forms of renewal that have a hope, because they proceed from the community itself and from the relationships within it rather than from the kinds of programs that governments do not have the resources to run.  Yet, the question remains, who will begin these relational approaches to neighbourhood renewal within communities that are so oppressed by poverty and violence and fear?  Who will continue them through the many difficult years that will be required to renew a whole culture and a whole community?

This is where I truly have no answers?  Perhaps it is too much to expect from these broken neighbourhoods themselves.  Perhaps it can only be expected from those of us who have been fortunate enough to experience what a neighbourhood and a community and a family can be.  Perhaps it requires you or I or both of us to go and begin to live in these neighbourhoods as best we can in order to support and encourage those who are already living there as best they can.  If so, I am at fault.  Though I am moved to pity, I am not willing to stop by the side of this road.