One hand in our pocket...And the other one is giving the peace sign

Yesterday, I went on a bus tour of some areas of South Dallas that are struggling for survival. A few folks are putting lots of time and what money they can into revitalization efforts.

You know those areas are there...perhaps they don't look as bad as the pictures of slums in New York City or Los Angeles, but they are still slums. They just have more grass because of all the empty lots and the few proud homeowners who are trying to make a difference.

It was a kind of bizarre experience riding around in an air-conditioned bus. It felt rather like watching a movie. Normally, I'd be in a car and feeling nervous for my safety at points. But, when you're riding in large machinery and the tour guide is a respected pastor in the community who gets waves from the residents as you drive by, it's different.

I also heared on the radio today that only 1 in 6, or 16% of Louisiana kids evacuated to Texas passed the Texas TAKS test.

This all makes me sad. We are so blessed and so not blessed all at the same time here in our United States. I wish I'd had a camera and could have taken a few pictures yesterday.

For instance, of the beautiful little three-year-old boy sitting at the end of his sidewalk in the housing project in his red Little Tykes car, watching us go by...Behind two layers of locked fencing to keep him a little safer from the world around him. He looked stoic, and not unhappy.

The corner grocery store, where kids and adults alike congregated out front in large clusters...the same store where they sell diapers and cigarettes "by the each," or "brown bags" if you don't look like a cop. (Kits for smoking crack, in case you didn't know. I didn't.)

The $27 a day "American Inn," where I could only imagine what goes on behind the closed doors, but they do have "colour t.v.," even in America.

The public high school tennis court, where the white trimming along the top of the net has somehow come undone and droops somewhere near the bottom instead, along with lots of leaves and dirt and months or years of other accumulation. Who has time for tennis when you're fighting for your life many days?

The narrow streets where every other house is boarded up, a few are painstakingly maintained, and the rest have junk spilling out onto the sidewalks from the broken porches and windows.

The beautifully-kept historical Jewish cemetery, where there, at least, it looks like people either respect the grounds, or someone does a lot of cleaning up on a regular basis.

The scrap metal shop open 24 hours a day; the other one that opens at 11 p.m., where money can be had for church air conditioners and the police don't respond to the call until four days later.

The True Lee Missionary Baptist Church, where a congregation and pastor, and his father before him, have struggled for something like 60 or 70 years to exert a positive influence on a community that is vastly covered with concrete parking lots created by "eminent domain" for the State Fair 20 years ago. The pastor is dressed in a suit and tie on a Wednesday evening, and directs the bus driver to stop while he goes to the door to pick up his wife, in a black Sunday dress, after he takes the time to direct our casually and expensively dressed group around his neighborhood.

Truly a humbling experience, and although I went to high school in a similar neighborhood in Denver, it has been a long time since I had a reminder of what is tucked away in our country. We are definitely a nation of disparities.

What can I do? I'll have to think about that.


(FYI...Title of post borrowed from Alanis Morissette, "Hand in my pocket." Wish I could say it was my idea, but it's not :-) I just thought the whole song lyric fits well with this subject, from my POV.)