Chicago had Eliot Ness; Gotham City has Batman, and Metropolis has Superman. What do they have in common, you say? They’ve been protecting cities during and after the Great Depression that have been overrun with CCP: crime, corruption, and politics, which is what has been infecting Detroit.
This Great Recession has hit the Motor City the hardest over the past year: starting with the Kwame Kilpatrick saga, a scandalous tale of adultery, perjury, abuse of power, and much more. This story has plagued Detroit since and may have given the city a bad name — and a bad reputation.
Since then, the hits kept on coming: with the recent bankruptcy of the automotive industry, increase unemployment and job loss– making it harder for recent graduates to start their post-college career and finding work that they’re overqualified for. Most of all, it gets harder for your parents to send you away to school as well as pay your tuition and so forth, with cuts in education that includes closing down schools.
Still, you go where the work is, and you take what you can get because you need the job and the money to make ends meet, support yourself and your family, pay the bills, put food on table, and have a roof over your head.
Now, Detroit could really be in a Depression with Mayor Dave Bing’s proposed plans to cut the weekend service of the Detroit Department of Transportation (D-DOT), which means no buses after 6pm on Saturday and no Sunday service come September 26.
Mayor Bing and whoever suggested this insane idea may know how to play the game of business and basketball, but neither one knows how to play when it comes to the welfare of people — especially where the future of today’s youth are concerned.
Mayor Bing and the City Council need to think about this long and hard before making a decision that’ll come back and bite them in the you-know-what in the long run. They have to stop thinking about dollars and cents as well as getting to the bottom line of bureaucracy at the cost of ignoring their conscience, and need to think with both their head and their heart. Most of all, they need come from above and down here so they can see how much we, the people of Detroit, are suffering and struggling to survive in this Recession every day.
With fall coming and winter on its way, how are we supposed to get work and get home if it’s start raining hard? Or, if there’s a snowstorm? How are we supposed to get to church on Sundays? Whether we have class or errands to run, our lives never stop, which is why we need buses running 24-7 because we’re always on the run 24-7.
Nathan Ford of TNT’s Leverage Consulting & Associates states that the rich and powerful take whatever they want, and they take it back as modern-day Robin Hoods. In Detroit’s case, it is the opposite: robbing from the poor and needy and taking the money to those in office for their agenda and benefits. One thing is certain: corruption is within the city of Detroit. It is within not only us common citizens, but within the people we elect into office as well as the police department.
Not too long, someone asked me why I haven’t left Detroit, which is the same question I tell myself from time to time, and I think I know the answer. Maybe the reason is because of the National People’s Summit and Tent City, and the public hearings in response of the proposed bus cuts to know that Detroit is on the verge of Depression.
Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are no longer with us, but just as God’s Spirit lives inside of us, so do their spirits. We must take up the platform of civil rights once more to advocate fairness, equality, tolerance, compassion, and justice for all socially, economically, and racially. We need to fight the good fight of freedom, liberty, peace, honor, and so forth … because the time is ripe to do right.
