Mr. President is visiting my neighborhood. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised; presidents are always going and reading books to schoolchildren. Obama just happened to pick the one 300 yards from my house—the one for which they’re shutting down one of the two access roads out of our already isolated and (but not today) forgotten neighborhood.
I usually don’t take that road anyway. I usually cut across the tracks and slip between the sub-station and the factory, emerging from the trees right by the wastewater pump. But I imagine secret service won’t dig people walking out of the woods right next to where the president is speaking. It’s not their fault that locals improvise paths where urban planners hoped for barriers. That’s life. But still, I’m going the long way out today, just to be on the safe side.
It also shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Wright Middle School was picked. It’s the most representative of America’s breadth and depth of any school in the country: a huge immigrant population, mostly of Latin American (Mexican and Honduran, mostly) and Southeast Asian (Hmong, mostly) extraction, but also from Eastern Europe and Africa.
I used to walk the halls of Wright—we held our church services there for a few years—and pray for the children whose names were on the lockers, and marvel at this strange world.
Having grown up in Switzerland in rapidly-integrating Europe, I lived as a foreigner in a place where 20% of the population was foreign. Wisconsin doesn’t come close. But Burr Oaks Neighborhood, were I live, does. And nearly 40% of Wright Middle School does. It’s amazing and it’s really fun.
What’s not so fun is the poverty here. 85% of Wright’s students qualify for food assistance; people here are poor, unemployed or (far more frequently) underemployed, often on parole or with pasts. There are drugs here, of course, and the legal ones (cheap booze) dominate. Prostitution is all over.
But this is also a happy neighborhood. Probably not unrelated to the poverty, there are tons of children here, who play all over the streets, because they’re not, like so many middle-class children these days, being enslaved in endless after-school activities. That may be what it takes to get to college these days—cultural capital, they call it—but the poor never know these secrets. So the neighborhood is full of children’s laughter.
And people help each other. My next door neighbor borrowed my drill without saying what for, and used it to fix my gate. People walk around giving each other food all the time. The local crack-dealer, who was also a handiman, used to plow all our driveways in the winter, without being asked. That was before he died. I’ve signed court documents for neighbors, vouching for their good behavior.
Anyway, Obama is, through no plan of his own (his people most likely were looking for a school with a photo-op’s worth of diverse children), shining a light on a forgotten, cut off, segregated-away neighborhood—the neighborhood in which I’ve worked, lived, voted, shopped, attended church and at times all of the above for twelve years.
I use the occasion to welcome you.
