My Old Neighborhood

My old neighborhood in Seattle, where the Kid went from tiny boy child to a young man. Where we knew all the grocery store clerks and the pharmacist and who to watch out for on the street. Where our neighbors looked out for us and we looked out for them. We traded flour and sugar and eggs and bus fare and cigarettes. Where we were just a 7 minute walk from my work or Kid's school or the the grocery or drugstore and a bus ride to everywhere else. Where the spectacle had a hard time taking hold because we all knew the realities of the world and couldn't afford the cushioning to hide ourselves from it.

Where sometimes (and more often than sometimes as the Kid grew big enough to be easy prey- people will stop a stranger from hurting a small child in public but teens and near teens don't have that layer of protection) bad shit happened. Police raids with those big things they use to ram doors, multiple shootings, a domestic dispute where my neighbors beat each other's cars with baseball bats till there wasn't a window or light intact. I think domestic violence is more obvious in poor neighborhoods, where small apartments can't hide the screaming and constant financial stress leaves everyone more angry.

That long intro was just so i could show you all a video. I am homesick tonight.

Blue Scholars: Back Home


Certain scenes from this video (the girl walking past the construction site, for example) were shot right across the street from our old apartment. The grocery store where all the clerks knew the Kid's name was in the same shopping center as the recruiting offices for each fucking branch of the military. They were well placed. That shopping center was were all the neighborhood high school kids, the ones who weren't white kids bussed in from fancy craftsman homes in the north of the city to go to the AP program, would congregate when the afternoon bell rang at Garfield high school (which is also in the video). The kids would get their afternoon sugar fix at the Red Apple store or the AMPM, or the lucky ones with more than a buck or two would get a Starbucks coffee. And the recruiters were there. Just waiting for those black and brown and "other" kids to realize there wasn't much else for them. There's no college scholarship. There's no job. But if you sign up, oh that can all be changed and you can be all that you can be.

When we moved into the big fancy craftsman house with Ruth and Bernard in the north of the city for that last year, we lost all that. We lost the neighbors and the grocery clerks and the friendships and the sense of community. We also lost the high likelihood of violence aimed at the kid. (Though I still saw plenty of cops doing crappy shit to brown kids in the fancy neighborhood, that didn't change).

And nowhere near the shopping center that housed the new grocery store (Whole Foods) and the drugstore and the super expensive kitchen gadget store, and the Dania furniture store, was a military recruiting office, even though the high school was right there.

The kids in that neighborhood were paler and richer. College was inevitable, though which one was the question. There wasn't going to be a hard awakening for those kids about the realities of the world that would drive them into the Army recruiter's storefront. These are kids for whom the afternoon Starbucks is a mandatory expense along with music lessons and sports teams and SAT tutoring. In my old neighborhood, coming up with the testing fees alone would have been a challenge. Tutoring was out of the question.

But the real issue is, for those poor kids whose reality doesn't include SATs and college applications or even the possibility of a living wage job, is it really a choice when the only option left is military service. Is this kind of disparity it's own sort of underhanded draft in order to, once again and as always, pull poor boys and girls into fighting with and the killing of and dying at the hands of other poor boys and girls, all while the strings are pulled by the parents of the kids who can always afford an after school Starbucks.