Removing violence. . .delivering a community of hope

High Hopes

Bruce Springsteen's latest gets at much of what we witness, engage and struggle with on a daily basis.

Sadness

 I've seen it deeply, indelibly etched on the faces of literally thousands of our neighbors as they sit in the waiting area of our food pantry on Haskell Avenue in inner city East Dallas.

You can't miss it if you stop long enough to take it in.

Sadness.

Deep sadness.

Even beneath the smiles of courtesy and politeness, the deep facial lines, chiseled by a long, long bout with continual disappointment and the limitations imposed by chronic, unrelenting poverty, remain.

Inescapable sadness.

Sadness that spills over into the lives of children early on.

Sadness that imposes limits, curtails expectations, and that all too often pools up at depths sufficient to swamp an otherwise promising life.

Sadness creates cesspools of hopelessness and resignation.

The variety of sadness I've observed again and again in the inner city demands a life-patience beyond my capacity to comprehend.  

Most of my middle class and upper class friends have no clue.  More significantly, we go to great lengths to dispel any notion of sadness.

Sadness discomforts us.

We avoid it at costs.

We even attempt to "shew it away" whenever we see it!

This ignorance arises from a basic inexperience in waiting for anything, especially the necessities of life:  food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, employment, safety, health care, recreation, entertainment, celebration, civic life and organization, public engagement, to name a few.

Most of us wait for very little.

The patient response of the poor to the overwhelming sadness of so much of life lived in poverty contributes to the maintenance of social stability.

While we should be grateful, most of us remain unknowing.

Poverty creates a foreboding culture defined largely by deep, thick sadness.

Good news to the poor always involves driving the sadness out of life--a mission that can be accomplished only in a community that embraces sadness.  To deliver hope a community must live out of a commitment to understanding, honest self-evaluation, and radical dependence on those who know this sadness best, those who live it out every day.

I wonder if we're up to it?

Hopelessness vs laziness

It occurred to me recently that middleclass and upperclass folks who accuse underclass folks of being lazy don't really understand life in the ghetto. 

When you have little or no hope of landing the kind of job that would allow you, literally, to work your way out of poverty and all of its deadends, a paralysis of hopelessness can set in.  When it does, lots of people simply come to a halt.  It is as if a wall emerges from the ground in the pathway and the parade of a person's life simply stops. 

Hopelessness may lead to a series of odd jobs; you know, hit and miss kind of work that pays a wage, but not one that's liveable or progressive.

For lots of people the deadends of life signal an end to effort. 

"What's the use?" can become the fundamental question of life.  And, until that question finds a reasonable answer, life is going nowhere.

So, the next time you think "lazy," stop and reconsider. 

Ask some questions. 

Get better acquainted with the power of hope and the devastating nature of hopelessness.