There are many books about the decline of Detroit from a thriving industrial powerhouse to a city that lost close to two-thirds its population before entering bankruptcy.
I have read several, along with many more newspaper and magazine articles about Detroit. I could give you a reasonably accurate lecture about what happened.
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But I think that in the final analysis, something Karl Marx said long ago says it all: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” You don’t have to be a philosopher or a Marxist to look at Detroit and realize how true that is.
Detroit survived bankruptcy, and there is a real, if limited, renaissance going on at the city’s core. But it is scarcely all-inclusive. There are still neighborhoods, especially on the East side, that you might think twice about going into, even in broad daylight.
There are places where the only convenient food options, especially for those without access to a car, are party stores. There are children in Detroit who may never have seen a truly fresh vegetable, and streets that look like sets for World War II movies, even now. Take the Lodge south to Howard Street, get off and drive west on Lafayette Boulevard.
You’ll see what I am talking about. Twenty years ago, the destruction evoked little more than shrugs from the media. But John George and Motor City Blight Busters were out there fighting, as were a few other unsung groups. A few years ago, an elderly Jewish doctor helped African-Americans revitalize the Northwest Activities Center, and then, with his daughter Karen and a brilliant young Muslim woman named Anima Iqbal, started something called Project Healthy Community, that not only helped feed people but taught them about nutrition.
That doesn’t mean more massive government help isn’t needed. It is – but the private sector needs to be involved too. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a city to save a city:
Detroit City. What Detroit needs most is jobs, schools that do the job and which parents can trust, and some form of mass transit to and from the suburbs, where most Detroiters who have jobs actually work. Fighting crime is important, but that can be managed.
What we may need most of all is the ability to teach Detroiters, especially children and young people how to dream again. Bobby Kennedy, my political hero, was the one white politician who was most at home with inner-city black folks, and was trusted by them.
Hard to believe, but he was assassinated half a century ago, during a campaign that might well have made him President. Had that happened, this might be a very different world today.
Instead, we are left with archival footage of him saying, “Some men see things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and say, why not?
That’s how I think we ought to look at Detroit today. But we also should remember something else Kennedy once said: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
If you do nothing else today, try and create a ripple.
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