Road Trip Part 2
Since I last wrote, I've been to Columbus and Toledo in Ohio, where I saw Sean, Jeff, Jared, Kathryn, and Weird Beard among others. In Toledo, I saw Emily and Miss Davis for breakfast and lunch respectively. Most recently, I arrived back in Detroit.
Seeing everything in Detroit is reminding me exactly what I'm fighting for when I work in the work that I do. The class divide is disgusting. The poor get no help. The rich are either only concerned with their own problems or have no idea just how bad it is.
Police stations in the darker parts of town close at 4:00 p.m. because they can't afford to stay open. The streetlights can't stay on all night. 40% of the streetlights don't work. But in the next town over, Grosse Pointe, the rich people neighborhood, police are on standby for concerts in the park. The issue is not insufficient funds. The issue is that the money is not being divided equally and fairly, and the rich don't don't know or don't care.
The Daily Show just ran a bunch of statistics and discovered that the average police response time in Detroit is 58 minutes, compared to Grosse Pointe which is a better rate than the national average for police response time (11 minutes). TDS made a dark yet sort of true joke that you can get a pizza faster than you can get the police to respond to you being shot.
And I say this all knowing I grew up in Huntington Woods, an area that all things considered had it pretty great. I say this as someone who has no right to. But maybe that's why I want to do what I do. Maybe that's why I at some point changed from wanting to be all about writing to being about nonprofit and helping the homeless.
Maybe that's why I've been so hard on Gabby's parents. I don't think they're bad people. I think I've just been infuriated that they look down on me for working for a homeless shelter, and how context of conversations implies that I'm basically enabling drug addicts all day and that personal fuckups are the only possible way someone can be poor. I think I've just been angry that they've never had to think otherwise. Their world never forced them to consider otherwise.
I don't think I hate them. I think I just hate the system. Which makes me a little happier to be moving to Seattle to work on this stuff. I'll work alongside the newly developing homeless scene over there (well, new compared to the advocacy work Boston does), and I'll try really hard to get into the University of Washington and get an MSW to get even better at this stuff. I don't want to hold onto this hatred forever, if it does exist. But if I keep that in mind, I might stop being such a prick sooner or later. Up until this point, I kept thinking they fired the first shot, but that's probably not true.
I spent all morning with Alex Jones, who told me his side of how all this Detroit stuff is doing, like the bankruptcy thing, and he told me he's finally feeling like he needs to get out too. We talked about how I wasn't really ready to leave when I left either, but it got easier and eventually became a great thing. He mentioned he was thinking about it, but he needed more time to save up and prepare.
The last thing Alex said to me was "Call me when you get there," and I said, "You too."
-Didroy
Seeing everything in Detroit is reminding me exactly what I'm fighting for when I work in the work that I do. The class divide is disgusting. The poor get no help. The rich are either only concerned with their own problems or have no idea just how bad it is.
Police stations in the darker parts of town close at 4:00 p.m. because they can't afford to stay open. The streetlights can't stay on all night. 40% of the streetlights don't work. But in the next town over, Grosse Pointe, the rich people neighborhood, police are on standby for concerts in the park. The issue is not insufficient funds. The issue is that the money is not being divided equally and fairly, and the rich don't don't know or don't care.
The Daily Show just ran a bunch of statistics and discovered that the average police response time in Detroit is 58 minutes, compared to Grosse Pointe which is a better rate than the national average for police response time (11 minutes). TDS made a dark yet sort of true joke that you can get a pizza faster than you can get the police to respond to you being shot.
And I say this all knowing I grew up in Huntington Woods, an area that all things considered had it pretty great. I say this as someone who has no right to. But maybe that's why I want to do what I do. Maybe that's why I at some point changed from wanting to be all about writing to being about nonprofit and helping the homeless.
Maybe that's why I've been so hard on Gabby's parents. I don't think they're bad people. I think I've just been infuriated that they look down on me for working for a homeless shelter, and how context of conversations implies that I'm basically enabling drug addicts all day and that personal fuckups are the only possible way someone can be poor. I think I've just been angry that they've never had to think otherwise. Their world never forced them to consider otherwise.
I don't think I hate them. I think I just hate the system. Which makes me a little happier to be moving to Seattle to work on this stuff. I'll work alongside the newly developing homeless scene over there (well, new compared to the advocacy work Boston does), and I'll try really hard to get into the University of Washington and get an MSW to get even better at this stuff. I don't want to hold onto this hatred forever, if it does exist. But if I keep that in mind, I might stop being such a prick sooner or later. Up until this point, I kept thinking they fired the first shot, but that's probably not true.
I spent all morning with Alex Jones, who told me his side of how all this Detroit stuff is doing, like the bankruptcy thing, and he told me he's finally feeling like he needs to get out too. We talked about how I wasn't really ready to leave when I left either, but it got easier and eventually became a great thing. He mentioned he was thinking about it, but he needed more time to save up and prepare.
The last thing Alex said to me was "Call me when you get there," and I said, "You too."
-Didroy