Albany Park

Outside restaurants thick-featured men gesticulate, filling the sidewalk with smoke and guttural laughter. Mothers and aunts and children orbit strollers in bundles of chattering chaos. A hooded figure makes sounds to himself in a doorway. English is the common language, but not the most common.

Firecrackers send shocks through orange alleys, and cop cars flash to life, bursts of blue in the night. The bank sign gives the wrong time and temperature and the right CD interest rate. The rats continue to chew, one last meal before returning to the river. It's where I live. I sometimes call it the edge of civilization.

When I say something that white-devil ignorant, I feel ashamed. Even if what I meant by "civilization" is my own comfort level, people who don't look or act familiar are not barbarians. They don't eat babies. They bathe and shave, or at least wash and trim. Judging others from a position of ignorance is dangerous. There's a weakness of scope in my worldview.

On the street I instinctively assess the threat of any male not wearing a tie. I've turned my old suburban fear of brown and black and poor into a conditioned response by my choice of media and social circle. It limits me. I should introduce myself to people.

If I knew the poor as people, then I might stop enriching myself at their expense -- holding corporate stock, shopping at national grocery chains for the more sterile atmosphere and a few dollars savings, not advocating for citywide living wage. Then again, I might not. Luxuries become necessities. I'm not giving up my dishwasher. Others aren't giving up yoga class or expensive wine or cocaine and exotic parrots.

By not sharing wealth, by interpreting the American Dream myth literally, I perpetrate an act of violence against people. I'm the perp. That money earning dividends should feed and educate people rather than funding international exploitation. When it flows out of the community, that money takes away from those in need and gives to some jerk in Connecticut and his emaciated drunk of a wife (you can reverse the genders at your convenience). The money needs to flow into the community: jobs, taxes, infrastructure. Poverty fuels anger and desperation. Retaliation seems imminent.

This is a moral issue. Wealth is not a number on a piece of paper. You follow the green line straight to hell. It is a gift, a means to do something, to create health and beauty, to alleviate suffering, to send out waves of goodness. All it needs is a vehicle (not a yacht) and a vision.

When I walk the streets tough with poverty and commerce, lit by neon and adorned with litter, I am present in the community. I feel it living around me, its sounds and smells becoming part of me. I see the hard expressions on the faces passing by. I see past them. Our lives are entwined. Seeing this may not be much, but it's a start, a step toward love.

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