Like I said before, I grew up in a quaint little suburban bubble where
the biggest news stories, besides real ones like DUI’s, were about a naked man
running around dressed up like Zorro. When I came to Pittsburgh two summers ago
to work at a place on the North Side, I brought that background with me. I was
there for 2 months and lived at the place that I worked. I had no expectations
as to what the neighborhood would be like, what the summer would be like, or
the things that I would see/hear, or the people that I would interact with.
Sure, I knew it was a “bad” neighborhood. I mean, there was trash everywhere,
run-down houses on every street, and a corner at the top of the hill you knew to
stay away from because it was a breeding ground for drug deals and prostitution but every experience I had there was pleasant. The people were great; the community I was a part of was great- I knew not to take tours at night by myself but overall
I would say I felt really safe. We had heard stories about shootings or heard our friends tell us about people that they knew that were either in jail for life
or had their lives taken by the streets. But hey, those were just
stories.
We would hang out almost every night outside the guesthouse where we were living and on one
night in July myself and a friend were sitting outside waiting to go get some
sweet tea from good ole’ Mickey D’s. I was sitting up facing the alley and he
was lying down commenting on the clouds. We were chatting when I heard a rustle
in the bushes that accompanied a path, which led into the alley, which was right next to the guesthouse. In my head I
told myself it was just some kids playing tag (my bubble was my defense
mechanism). Then I heard some yelling and saw a ball of fire (which I convinced
myself were sparklers) and heard bangs (which I convinced myself were
firecrackers since the 4th of July had just taken place). I heard
one of the kids yell, “Shit man, he got me in the leg,” and convinced myself
further that it had to be a sparkler fight gone wrong, like what happened at the
beach a couple of summers before. Everything happened so fast but in my mind, it was slow motion. At that
point, I was still battling within myself as to what happened, clinging to the
bubble I knew but slowly coming to the conclusion that those weren’t fireworks
and it wasn’t an accident. My friend pulled me up and he ran towards the
schoolhouse as I ran towards the guesthouse- everything was locked. At that
point, everything started to cave in on me and I panicked, my body went into
automatic and tears and fear just started flowing out of me. I banged on every
door I could like a mad woman until finally someone let me in. When my friend
opened the door, seeing I was visibly upset, asked me what happened. Through the sobs all I could get out was, “I don’t know”.
That is when chaos ensued- people were running everywhere. Some inside,
to make sure that the campers that were with us were ok, some outside, to find
out what happened and make sure everyone outside was ok. As I was talking it
out with myself, I decided it had to have been fireworks and as I opened the
door to go back outside all I could smell was smoke, or as my friend quickly
told me, “That’s the smell of gun powder, Emily”. As I went outside, I called
911 (don’t worry, I wasn’t the first person) and it was busy…BUSY! Luckily, as
I walked over to the dumpsters, and saw a kid (yes, a kid- he was 13 and the other kid who shot him was 17) lying on the ground
with a gun shot to his leg, I was comforted in the fact that HE had already
called 911 himself. Is that normal?
It took the police a while to get there and while we waited most of the
people from the neighborhood either a) wanted to handle it themselves or b)
kept saying, “Just another Northside shooting” and either walked away or went
inside- only the white people (the outsiders) were dumb enough to talk to the
police. And from the police I got the same sentiments, “Welcome to Pittsburgh - welcome to the Northside - surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.” Is that
normal?
I think this was maybe on the last page of the local news section of the
newspaper. Two weeks later, there was a murder of someone most of us knew two
streets down. That might have made the news- doubt it; it was just another homicide in a "hot" week. Turns out, there were
bullet holes behind me and to the side of me; I know, that if the tables were
turned and I happened to be the one to have gotten shot, instead of some 13
year old from the Northside, it would have been a whole different story. Do you
know what that tells me? I matter and you don’t. I can’t imagine how I would
feel or how I would act if my education told me I was nothing, the police told
me I was nothing, the media told me I was nothing, etc. My parents could love
me all they want but when no one else is pouring into my life and no other
institutions are providing me with any kind of opportunities whether it is
social capital, or whatever, and if my life was just dubbed “another shooting,”
you’re setting me up for failure. How in the world can we have an abundant community, as McKnight describes, if it feels as though our children’s future is determined before they are even born? There is so much more to the Northside than violence and there is so much potential lost in our kids.
Ever seen this sign?
Image
Credit: Love Front Porch
How do we rally around our kids, yes kids, and let them know that they
are more than a statistic, more than the street, more than a number? How do we
combine institution with community and make it so that our kids know that there
are things out there for them that are better than this and mean it?
Check out Love Front Porch, which is the organization that started this
sign campaign and is an organization showing how communities can rally around our kids and become
the abundant community McKnight speaks of, in my humble opinion:
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