I Don't Even Have a Title For This One.

In the course of one of their "status updates", I was referred, by one of my various FaceSpaceFriends, to this blog: www.inandaround60655.blogspot.com . This is the post in question; reading the comments will be especially instructive (and/or bring you to the point of reverse digestion, as it very nearly did for me). And the fact that the original diatribe was written by someone who refers to himself as "Det. Shaved Longcock" gives it an extra air of insight and maturity.

I have, as usual, gotten ahead of myself.

Mount Greenwood Park is a fairly-large park at 111th Street and Central Park Ave, or thereabouts, in the neighborhood of the same name. This is very near the area in which I grew up; not quite the same district, but close. It's known as a stronghold of city workers (To you non-Chicagoans: All employees of the City of Chicago--police, firefighters, teachers, sanitation workers, anybody with a City job--must live within the boundaries of the city. Click here: Community Map Now go down near the bottom, to the leftmost part of the colored area. See that green chunk, with like a little stem hanging it onto the rest of the city? That's Mount Greenwood)...a stronghold of city workers and, not to put too fine a point on it, white people who don't want to be bothered with all those minority-types. Needless to say, as soon as I could get away from there, I did; the few times I've had to go back have been unmixed Hell. For most of my adult life I've had nothing even remotely positive to say about the neighborhood or the people who live there, and that includes the people I grew up with. My anger was based on my memories of being picked on, being teased, boys who didn't like me and girls who snickered at me behind my back; and even once I was old enough to realize that I was operating from the "victim" point-of-view in that case, by that time there was JP, and The Race Thing, to focus my anger onto. It was fairly easy to hate everybody; they were a faceless "Them" attached to bad memories and ugly politics.

With the advent of technology, though, I reconnected with quite a few of my grade-school friends. I've IMed with many of them, read their updates, and generally been pretty happy to discover that even some people I really didn't like very much when I was growing up, have turned into decent, reasonably-cool people. It's much harder to hate people when you know their day-to-day stuff, even if you DO have bad memories of them left from long ago, and so my attitude toward the old neighborhood had softened quite a bit, really, without me even noticing.

Well, as you might imagine, that opinion took a very LARGE hit this morning when I realized that one of the people I actually LIKED was pointing people toward this site and talking about "Save Mt. Greenwood Park!" I posted a status update that expressed my sadness at discovering that this kind of attitude still exists. That was about as far as I was comfortable letting myself go with it; it was a compromise wording, at best, from what I was REALLY feeling.

A few minutes later, I got an IM from another of these friends. "Everything OK? What's wrong?" I asked her if she'd read the blog the first girl had linked to, and she said yes, she had. "It just makes me really sad that people I LIKE are advocating this view," I said.

Long pause. "Well, they need to stay in their own parks and bbq there. Everybody's afraid to say anything because then they'll be called a racist, but that's bull."

Um....hm. O.....kay.....? Am I crazy, or....?

"Well, i mean, everybody has their own views," I replied.

The conversation went on for a while--a very short while, since it was evident we were discussing from two very, very different places. Then she got booted off, and I sent her a little e-mail where I finished "And I don't live there anymore, so I probably ought to stay out of it." Which is true.

But here's the thing: My mom has, for quite a while now, been agitating for me to keep her house when the inevitable day comes that her time on Earth is over. (Yeah, that's a squeamish, Irish-Catholic way of phrasing it; though she drives me bonkers sometimes, I love my mom, and don't like to think about this.) After my long-drawn saga with the Catastrophe, I've learned to appreciate a well-constructed, well-maintained building, and slowly I had begun to consider the possibility that yes, I might take over my mom's house after all, when the time came to make that decision.

Now? No. Hell no. There are houses all over the city, in places where people don't think in terms of "Us" vs. "Them", nor talk about the "fall" of a park just because some people of a different skin color have set out their lawn chairs there. They can say all they want about "liberals" and everything else--I knew what was coming when I read that sentence!!--but the fact of the matter is, THEY are the ones with the position based in fear and in lack of knowledge. "No, we don't think ANYONE of ANY race should be barbequing there..." Yeah. Okay. But if the picnickers were white, you would only notice them if they were being d-bags; because they're Those People, you just decide they don't belong, and nevermind if they're the most polite people on Earth.

I guess the real core of the matter, which reflects on me more than on them, is this: I hadn't thought about it for a while, and so it had sort of faded into the back of my mind. When you don't run into an issue, it's easier to pretend it's gone away, I guess; easier to think "hey, maybe it's not like that anymore." Well, it's "like that". It's very, very much "like that", and I don't think I'll be forgetting that any time soon.