Hope

I often visit cities with major problems. Some are apparent, some aren’t. Some appeared with the mechanization of farming. Some appeared a hundred years earlier when we used the so-called “Black Laws” to systematize the disenfranchisement of former slaves. Some appeared with the opening of the Interstate Highway system. Some appeared with the Swan Decision on April 20, 1971, in which the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. Some appeared when guns and drugs became the two products in America most easily acquired by the poor and hopeless. Some won’t become fully known until the Interstate Highway system becomes a vast parking lot covering the entire nation. (Casual observation suggests no more than ten years hence.) Some won’t appear until we see the psychological effects of children growing up in what I call “gated cities,” in which society shields them from any human that isn’t a mirror image.

I visit them all. I observe that the rain falls on the lucky and the unlucky.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m no genius. I can’t solve the problems generated by the foregoing causes, and others I didn’t mention. I can’t wave an academic voodoo-dust over a city and remove these problems. I can’t offer them a “bright-line” solution. I can’t promise them a magical prosperity just around the corner. I can’t say, “This too shall pass,” when I’m not sure it will.

What I can do is tp not insult, degrade, and humiliate them. What I can do is to not tell them that the problems are their fault and compare them to a third-world country. What I can do is offer them some ray of hope. What I can do is offer them, based on my experience and education, a path toward solutions that may help. At the same time, I might help lead them away from solutions that don’t work like those of the so-called urban designers who are telling them that planting trees on Main Street will bring back the retailers. They resemble the “cargo cult” natives of the South Sea islands who believed that making replicas of bombers would bring the Americans and their largess back to their islands after World War Two.

What I might do best is offer them the words of the Galilean in the 25^th Chapter of Matthew in the Christian New Testament:

“Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

If the Galilean heard what the President of the United States of America said to the people of Chicago, Illinois yesterday, I feel sure he— the Galileanؙ—wept again. Maybe we’ve lost account of what is just and holy. Maybe all of our urban problems began occurring the moment we began to care more about a person’s sexual orientation than about the young child in dirty diapers sitting on a front porch in the Arkansas Delta, hungry, hopeless, and weeping for all of us, both the just and the unjust.