I don't feel that the living conditions in the housing developments where LeAlan and Lloyd live are acceptable. As LeAlan's grandmother says the Ida B. Wells developments were not always bad and that it gradually went down as the community changed. I feel that when people take pride in where they live and care about their community then the environment is better. Where the boys lived people did not care and did not want to care about what was going on in their neighboorhood and that is why their community was not as lovely as it could have been.
As a young person in America, I feel horrible hearing that the city I live in had a community that was compared to Vietnam. How can we be satisfied knowing that one of our communities was compared to a war zone in the summer months? Even today I often hear Chicago being compared to Iraq because of all of the violence that has taken place here in the past 2 years. In the past year I have had 3 people who were all related to me die and two of those people were murdered on the streets here in Chicago, one an uncle in May of 2008 and one a 15 year old god-brother in Febuary of 2007. I am not satisfied with hearing that we were once compared to Vietnam nor Iraq because America is better than that.
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Brittany,
I too find it remarkable that such comparisons are made. Why is it that we lend such comparisons to our own setting? Is it an easy out to say that we are like a place like Iraq because we only know of the violence going on there? For instance, why do we compare ouselves to places we've never been? The problem is here, not there, so what are some ways we can keep our debates local and understand the reality behing the veil?
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