WASHINGTON – I live in Baltimore. It is a unique place. Whole sections transport one into the Colonial times or the nineteenth century. Mies van der Rohe buildings stand next to 200-year-old buildings. World-class hospitals and universities stride across some of our poorest neighborhoods.
I live a block off Broadway south of the Johns Hopkins Hospital complex. Until last Friday, houses were being renovated, small businesses were busy, and folks walked up and down the streets talking to each other in many different languages because, until last Friday, Baltimore was not hiding.
Today, as I drove up Broadway, stores were closed, and people were missing. The several houses on just my block that were being renovated are closed up. The ravages of xenophobia have come to my city, my neighborhood, my street, my neighbors. The Statue of Liberty’s torch has been darkened.
One person, one neighborhood, one city at a time emptied of masons, carpenters, gardeners, nannies, storekeepers, and their customers. America is hiding.
It is a tragedy unfolding not slowly but rapidly. Doctors, nurses, teachers, and scientists are all leaving. Gone to places where their skills and knowledge are welcome. Students, who after gaining their advanced degrees in science, mathematics and technology, who used to stay here to contribute to our advantage in those areas are gone.
America, the once shining beacon, is no more. Trust, once so thoroughly broken, will take decades to rebuild, if ever. The grabbing of every bit of available information and consolidating it into a single database is not the grist of a dystopian future but the present reality.
While the rapid changes of the last few months have made it undeniable, humans, those with blood, hearts, and lungs, have been losing ground for decades. We need to breathe, drink water, eat food. Those whose job it is to represent us have instead allowed our air, water and food, our oceans, deserts, mountains, streams, medicines, all the things human beings require for life, to be poisoned by the detritus left by lifeless corporations who over the past decades have bought their way to remove requirements and regulations.
Somehow, we, the people, have been complicit in our own destruction. We have been gaslighted into thinking that once flourishing unions were harmful to us. Politicians beholding to corporations lied, big surprise. The poorest, sickest, most ignorant, uneducated states decided that having created these dystopic conditions by greed and mismanagement, lead the way for “right to work” laws, which actually mean the right to work for fewer protections and less money than folks in unions.
By breeding distrust in government, those in government were distrustful. Those whose job descriptions state they are to work for the best interests of “we, the people,” have decided that their personal mission statement is to simply, only get reelected. And they do. Over and over and over because truth and lies fill every source of information, but the lies seem to be propagated so much more effectively because deep in everyone’s psyche are biases and prejudices that can be manipulated, and that, dear reader, is why my once vibrant street has gone silent.
M.A. Callahan
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
