At Our Worst When We Need to Be at Our Best

I work in a public library, and every once in a while we get a person passing through researching their family history in the region. This past week I met a rather remarkable fellow of this description. He is a retired computer programmer from a pioneering era in that technology, having gotten his computer degree through the GI bill in the middle part of the previous century. For some thirty years he has been researching one branch of his family, and in that time has documented and tabulated the lives and relationships of over 5000 cousins! All of them are descended from two brothers who settled in Maine in the 1600s, who brought with them three children each. In the course of America's history, their descendants played many innovative roles in science and other professions that have served to improve the overall quality and humanity of life in this country through time.During his fascinating conversation with me, I asked him where he hailed from, and he told me he was "ashamed" to say that he had formerly grown up and lived out his professional life in Detroit, Michigan. I asked him why he felt so negatively about a place for which he had been for so long a loyal citizen. He replied that Detroit had been disgraced and lost its honor as a city, and in fact, it was no longer a true city by any living definition of the word. Almost all the great industries had been exported by the company owners, who either left concrete deserts or gutted building where once there had been bustling productive life. Today the city has its gentrified cultural center, but the rest are miles of either abandoned neighborhoods, or neighborhoods made a living hell on earth by the encroachment of gang violence. He told me that some years ago over four million people left Detroit in a period of nine months, abandoning fine old homes unsold, and, for many of these emigres, entirely paid for. These were homes for which they had worked all their lives to comfortably retire in. He told me these refugees took to the road and searched even gravel and dirt back-roads for any affordable dwelling they might find in which to relocate themselves, all in a desperate bid to belong to any sort of real community that valued peace and good fellowship. The poor, especially African Americans, remain trapped in this dead community, where violence holds people hostage outside the redeveloped playgrounds of the rich. The genealogist who related these matters to me himself has become a nomad, traveling the country, living thriftily off a pension, and preserving a sense of pride in an America that once was, by discovering the historical and still current contributions of the great family to whom he belongs. In reflecting upon what he shared with me, a small-town librarian living in the Appalachian Foothills, I thought about how the economic "leaders" of our country have so trashed the legacy that so many millions before us worked to build for our nation. What a grave insult, but even more affectingly, what a heart-breaking shame that these leaders have chosen to throw it all away, not even having the innate capability to recognize its precious value, as they pursue the selfish goal of creating a mountain of wealth that does nothing for the good of the country in which they live, and from whose laws and established order they benefit.