LIVING FOR CHANGE

DETROIT-CITY OF HOPE

By Gracc Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Sept. 23-29m 2007

It is a complex fate to be a Detroiter.

On the one hand, we can bewail the hardships of living in a city abandoned by industry and supermarkets, depopulated by white and middle class flight, where public transportation barely exists and 300 or more people are killed by gunfire every year.

Or we can seize the opportunity to begin living simpler. healthier and more environmentally-friendly lives, which will not only help alleviate the planetary emergency but also begin creating the new concept of active citizenship called for in these worst and best of times. For example, do we keep hoping that supermarkets will return so that we can buy additives-contaminated foods trucked into the city by gas-guzzlers? Or do we support the community garden network that is already producing healthy food and reducing neighborhood blight, and expand it into a local economy with greenhouses, canning plants, and neighborhood food markets?

Do we continue to depend on the police and barred doors and windows to protect us from crime and violence? Or do we spend more time on our front porches and on our streets, looking out for our children and each other, biking instead of driving SUVs, working together on recycling and other environmental projects and, by bringing the neighbor back into the ‘hood, transforming our communities into Peace and Safety Zones?

Do we continue to look on helplessly as 30-50% of our children drop out of schools? Or do we recognize that our schools are now dysfunctional because they were structured a hundred years ago for the industrial age which has come to an end? Now it is up to us to begin creating schools that engage our children from K-12 in community-building, getting their cognitive juices flowing as they transform their surroundings and themselves, planting community gardens, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, painting public murals, learning from practice which has always been the best way to learn.

Do we continue to permit our young people to be incarcerated because they have drifted into drugs and petty crimes out of joblessness and hopelessness? Or do we organize Restorative Justice programs that provide opportunities for dialogue between non-violent offenders and community members, so that together we can discover ways and means to reintegrate our young people into our families and communities?

When we meet someone new these days, we usually ask: “What do you do?” In other words, what is your job?. We have allowed ourselves to be reduced to jobholders and consumers who define one another by our jobs, the clothes we wear or the cars we drive.

Accepting this economic/materialistic view of ourselves was understandable in the 19th and early 20th centuries when rapid economic and technological development was necessary to produce material abundance.

However, now that we are overwhelmed with consumer goods, our urgent need is to become active citizens, accepting continuing responsibility for our communities, our cities, our country, our world and our planet, including the responsibility for creating meaningful Work for everyone, Work that not only produces goods and services but is ecologically-friendly and develops our skills, gifts and citizenship.

If we want to be safe from petty criminals as well as global terrorists, we need to redefine and recreate ourselves as active citizens rather than as consumers and producers.

Detroit City of Hope is beginning this redefinition on a local level.

In the first half of 2007 we organized two events to commemorate the 40th anniversary of MLK’s anti-Vietnam war speech and of the Detroit Rebellion.

Based on what we learned from these two events, DCOH is now embarking on a five year campaign to support and expand a network of the individuals and organizations already engaged in activities to rebuild Detroit from the ground up.

We will be launching this campaign on Saturday, October 6, at a meeting co-hosted by The Gathering for Justice, the organization founded by Harry Belafonte to struggle against the criminalization and incarceration of our young people.

The meeting will be at YouthVille, 7375 Woodward Ave., from 9-4 p.m. Lunch will be served.

Our aim is for everyone to leave with a deeper commitment to rebuild and respirit Detroit because we have become more aware of how we each can contribute to this goal.

Email Grace Boggs Center,