INNER-CITY MOMENTS
For thousands of years, cities have been the center of culture, art, fashion, financial institutions, and experimental creativity. Urban dwellers and tourists visit art museums, music centers, sports arena, and commercial centers that form a shining city on the hill.
Few, however, visit the inner-city areas where life is quite different. A quote by John Steinbeck describes conditions in the inner-city: “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
The inner-city is a place of mean streets, the homeless clawing through trash bins for discarded food, the threat of dying alone.
The streets are not welcoming. Broken furniture is cast away. Sleep does not come easily. The corners of night are filled with danger.
For many in the inner-city, hope and visionary dreams are overwhelmed by the monsters of daily survival. Living on the street requires constant vigilance, attention to the moods of others, and seeing out of the corners of both eyes.
The icon of hope tatters and blows away. The only way is to survive.
In many parts of the inner-city, the man is white and uncaring.
A life of want, poverty, a life of despair rips and tears the spirit and soul.
Sometimes, joy enters in.
More often than not, the light has failed.
After thought:
“Our current contempt for poverty stems from information overload — this is the enabler — -our over education as privileged people — perhaps the real culprit — and our secret assurance that we ourselves owe no one anything beyond the exhausting daily round. We will defend our lack of idealism to anyone and be horrifyingly well received in this age. Indeed, many so called financial “philosophies” are in fact nothing more than elaborate justification for one petty selfishness after the next.”
― John Thomas Allen
