MLK Day, the Milwaukee Streetcar, and Fostering Community In thinking about both Martin Luther King Day and the meeting on the proposed Milwaukee streetcar, I can actually think of a unifying theme—a very personal, even selfish one. If you read further, those of you who don’t know how old I am definitely will. I should also tell you I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City in the 1970s. After my mother died (of an inherited yet little understood family illness—one that is now controllable and treatable—another story), my father hired someone else’s mother to watch us kids. Her name was Louise. I never knew her last name. She was African American and lived in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. There were four of us kids; I was the oldest at ten and my baby brother was only one. Louise had a son my age and an older daughter about 20 with a child of her own. Louise stayed in our guest room during the week and only saw her kids and granddaughter on weekends. I’m sure it made her very sad, which is how I developed a tiny bit of empathy in my privileged but small and sad world of motherlessness. I used to go in her room late at night when I couldn’t sleep—also when I went through “the change”—as she called it. She told me great stories and made me feel more “normal.” She was also left-handed as I was and shared my birthday. I adored Louise and wanted her to be happy. After I met her family (another story I may share sometime), I wanted them to live with us, but my dad wouldn’t allow it. Louise was completely dependent on my father to drive her to the train station to take her to the Path train under the Hudson to the subway to her home—when she did go. We couldn’t walk to any stores, and even if we did, people would probably stare, because ours was a very segregated town—though in the North. As a teen, I started riding my bike to public transit and taking it where I could. This opened my eyes to the fact that there was a larger world out there—and also made me feel a part of it. I saw people like Louise—and people from towns like mostly Jewish Fair Lawn, NJ, and East Asians, Eastern Europeans, and Puerto Rican immigrants—coming and going to jobs, juggling family responsibilities, usually but not always people with less money than our family had. So if there was ever a crisis that hit our area—a big snow storm, that awful Son of Sam manhunt, etc.—I saw myself as part of a community. This was even at the time that Charles Putnam describes in his book, Bowling Alone as the beginning of the period where people stopped taking part in civic organizations. This past weekend, many people in Wisconsin temporarily became joined in a common zeal to see the Packers beat the Seahawks. I’m sorry that didn’t happen, but I felt a little resentful that this Packer spirit stuff was “forced” on my grandchild’s class in kindergarten for “spirit day.” Thinking about it again today though, I realize there is very little that brings people from different backgrounds together in 21st century Milwaukee—people from different racial, ethnic, economic, political, and religious backgrounds. We also live in a particularly isolated age, due to our technology-based entertainment and communications. The school and teachers were right to try to find something that will plant the seed in kids’ heads that we are unified in something bigger than our differences. When I was a kid, we had POW bracelets. Thank God, we don’t impress on our kids every day the horrors and realities of war—or maybe we should(?). Now back to the Milwaukee streetcar and transit generally: The starter route begins in an area where businesses are already located; their taxes, not residents’ taxes, will pay for it on top of pre-allotted federal money that can’t be used for anything else. Sociologically, it will tie people who mostly belong to the same demographic together at first—primarily office staff, professionals, and workers in the service industry that support them. Then it will expand to bring people from nearby suburban residential areas into downtown, either directly or via transfers from buses or Park and Rides. This will mix a more diverse set of people into the original group. The transit system as a whole will then tie potential workers who live in blighted areas to jobs that now mostly exist far outside the city. This is the part I believe some individuals object to. Let me address that—even setting aside any racist and classist underpinnings of this objection—you suburbanites NEED the workers. We NEEDED Louise. She was a saint, but she couldn’t keep leaving her family every day without a chance to see them. Let workers travel to work in your stores and in the factories you don’t want to work at anyway that exist in the former farm fields in Waukesha and Ozaukee County—and let them go home too. And those of you who may think I’m now favoring racist and classist attitudes, guess what? People will start riding next to one another, passing each other on the street, having conversations even, and we may all start realizing we have more in common as a community than the artificial and temporary support of professional football. Louise changed my life; transit galvanized my commitment to a larger community than the insular one defined by my ethnic, social, and religious background. I say Go Streetcar—and thanks MLK and Rosa Parks, and the many other unsung heroes who made it possible to RIDE THE STREETCAR TOGETHER!! Community Response to the Transit Crisis; Milwaukee Streetcar
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:46:35 +0000
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