More Scary than Halloween is How Little the Institutions and Leaders in Flint Care about Children of Limited Resources

 

“This is an opportunity to increase public safety in our community. This millage could pay for the equivalent of 50 officers and add – yes, add – to our police and fire departments.

Mayor of Flint

Once upon a time there was this idea that children in Flint had no value, so they would go to school and come home without back pack or homework…there were be no expectations for them to be or do anything of value in their day to day life and for their future. There were be not a solid plan of what would happen when they graduate, and if they graduate, for the curriculum at school is useless at best, and the opportunities in the city thanks to the present leaders equal to zero. So these children would wonder the streets of Flint with no direction and a lot of anger.

And there were be election time and the Mayor of Flint would plead for more money from fearful residents of Flint to put more of those angry children in jail with a mileage, that if it pass will bring more police officers and fire fighters in the streets. The  Mayor presenting his argument that incarceration is the brilliant Rhode Scholar solution to control the unruly, the angry, the ignorant, the adolescent that has lost any direction and hope, nor the desire to belong to a city that reject him or her because she is poor and uneducated.

Like Ansel and Greatel, the set up is to make them to waste their time while tempting them with easy money from drug dealing jobs, stealing for pawnshops or taking siding for metal scraping sites, to end up as criminals that feed the Flint industry of crime- the official one of lawyers,  parole officers, and all the insular industry of food, clothing that support the functioning of jails, or in the official language “Law enforcement and Public Safety, and the untrue name of correctional facilities…”

This system starts in the neighborhoods of Flint creepily ends up at the door steps of the City Hall building which houses the Flint Police Department and in front of the City Hall, the Jail…and how creepy it is that the most important buildings that surrounds the executive branch of government in the city of Flint are related to crime….

It is so, so scary for children of limited resources to live in Flint that a father (a neighbor on one of the properties I bought in MP) abandoned his home which has been paying for more than seventeen years to move and start a new life (as a renter) for his younger daughter in Grand Blanc. Having seen enough of the demise of lives of children in Flint, this father’s hope is that something better could happen to his younger daughter. After so much despair, cool selfishness from adults toward children, he had the courage to say no thanks to the city of Flint, not thanks to the schools in Flint, not thanks to the politician in Flint. He knew that by moving to Grand Blanc, his daughter would be out of danger of being killed not only physically but mentally and emotionally.

In Grand Blanc, she would encounter another type of people, people that would expect great things from her- she would have a future. The same child that in Flint, as African American of limited resources, was founded incapable of reading, and was giving an exercise class instead of extra help in reading, is considered in Grand Blanc intelligent and full of potential.

And like a great story, this child that had problems reading and that was receiving poor education in Flint schools moved to the Grand Blanc district and she has special classes and teachers that care and a backpack full of homework to do at home. Of course, she does not want to come back ever again to Flint, the city where the Mayor and all the other officials eat the children’s future. She knows better that Flint is a very scary place for poor children…UHHHHHHH

If you already connected in the neighborhood..

You already know who will be willing to make a little money

On the side dealing dope. You know in the ghetto there always be a whole bunch of young guys without work and without much to do looking for opportunities like this. They see the fancy clothes, fast cars, new sneaker and all that, and they want it. Many of them ain’t got much going on for them at home. If the police rolls up on them they face little penalties because they minors..

 Interviewed with Cash Money Pockets of Crime by Peter K. B. St. Jean

 

So when people in Flint tell you that Devil nights is dangerous and that houses are burning…you will know why… It is because angry adults one time were children in Flint and, nobody,       nobody cared for them, nor the teachers, nor the Mayor of Flint, nor their parents. And now they are burning deteriorated houses to take revenge, to burn their frustrations…

So, it is not Halloween that is scary in Flint. It is the Mayor and his political allies who are the scariest of them all! And from the children of limited resources with no parental supervision.. Flint is a very, very dark hole…a dungeon of not return…

“If you see a bunch of young kids hanging out on the corner when they

 should be in school or when it is too late for them to be out anyway, you know that they done gone wild. You know that they up to no good. At least that is how many drug dealers think. You need bodies to peddle the stuff so here is your opportunity. Sometimes you see them hanging on the corner like in front of a liquor store, a vacant lot or a house, and you already know that they be dealing there. But you see not all of them already be involved. Some of them are looking for that chance….In the same way, a drug dealer can pick young guys on the street corners because they be standing there waiting for something to happen, waiting for an opportunity. So that is how you get them….”

Interviewed with Cash Money  for Pockets of Crime by Peter K. B. St. Jean

UHHHHH, Halloween is not scary, what it is truly scary, it to be poor in Flint..UHHHH…and with no place to go than the liquor stores, dangerous parks, broken sidewalks, slam rental owners, police in big cars that patrolled the streets and find you a suspect…UH HHH Halloween is not scary, it is the politicians that blame your poverty for not making their job and so it goes…. You end up in jail and they end up in Washington feeling very proud of themselves….UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

One day I am writing the application of the TED Prize and the next I am weeding the park

Writing the TED prize was a good mental exercise, and it took a painstaking amount of time to translate thoughts and images from my brain into clear American English, for as a dyslexic, I have clear concepts, images, an ideas, but not clear words.

 

Anyway, the writing is done (sent at the last minute 11.59 pm) and yesterday morning, I took my children to weed the playground…and think…yes think.

See, we have the Art in The park festival next Saturday and the park needs to look attractive…when people come to visit our park, I want them to be pleased and impress…and see themselves living in Mott Park.

See, the park is not in complete disrepair, but need so much help! When I collect the weeds, I see the people coming and using the park…and it seems to me that they do not have the urge to clean the park as I have..Why? Are they so used to decay in their lives that this is OK? Is it me that want the park to look like parks in Fenton? Is it me that has higher expectations?

The park has no flower, and yet because the time in which it  was designed for a Flint that was rich, very rich is a magnificent piece of urban design. I am amazed that has lasted so long..and yet, vandalism has paid it visit and some of the tennis course metal walls are broken..and the list goes on and on.

I analyzed and tried to find techniques to motivate a new kind of behavior because everything that I see is passive victimhood type of” well I live in Flint what do you expect,” to complete denial of running around the huge weeds on the stairs coming down the park ( which I removed this morning in my dog-morning walk), “well I am  here for the time being while things get better, or I’m moving to another college soon, or I am going to be famous writing and will be able forget that I come from Flint, bye” to the sick nostalgia “things were better then”…when in reality if you are like me and talk to the seniors…drinking and wife beaters have been in the park forever.. the difference is that churches, and pastors/fathers were doing more community visits to the homes in Mott Park…and the police did not have this detached macho cars to drive around..and there were no TV’s..only the park.

So, I have been thinking that I will do and experiment  to give permission to people to try a different attitude…I will attach signs around the park

Mott Park is In Need of a Lot of  Love

To increase the Mott Park’s Quotient of Love:

• You have to feel this park belongs to you because it is true.
• Come and pray and be thankful to have such wonderful place in the city.
• Come and meditate.
• Come and play.
• Come and laugh.
• Come and weed the gardens.
• Come and weed the play areas.
• Come and paint the walls of the tunnel.
• Come and plant flowers.
• Come and collect the litter.
• But most of all come with all your friends to visit the park often

 Because if you love the Park,

The Park will love you

Back

And like magic the Karma of the park will change

The park is waiting for you

With open arms

The Mott Park Lady

After I hang the papers, I will let you know how things turn out…in the meantime look at this jewel that is Mott Park.

Everybody is Leaving My Neighborhood but I Can’t

 

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

With a sorrowed face our next door neighbor has shared to my husband that they are planning to move to Flushing-a most middle class white suburb in Genesee County.

My husband has brought the “bad news while I was cooking, and asked me for the thousand times why we are staying in Mott Park.”

I answered with the same voice and clarity that I try to show to everybody that is looking at me- this crazy person that I am for staying in Flint when my family could buy a wonderful house in the suburbs and be “like everybody else” happy ever after. Truly?

I answered all the reasonable answers to my husband the engineer, the professor, the one that is supporting me even though he is not very convinced why I am doing this.

Yes, it is nice to live in a place where the house is paid and all the extra income is used for the tens of classes that my family takes at the marvelous Flint Cultural Center (the Flint Institute of Music, the Sloan and the Planetarium, the Flint Youth Theater and the Flint Institute of Arts). And it is nice to live in front of a wonderful park and a river and a university –Kettering University. It is nice to live close to the revitalized downtown Flint and the Flint Farmer’s Market and the Flint Public Library and the University of Michigan- Flint.

But there is something deeper that connects me with Flint and Mott Park and is violence and death and the desperate need to change things. A child that I have never met has been killed in the park in front of my house and that has changed all the equations.

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/14-year-old_antonio_bell_jr_is.html

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2012/06/family_friends_call_death_of_1.html

When my children were born (and I have to tell the truth, I desperately wanted my first child to be born in Ann Arbor), things changed forever. I did not want them to carry the horrible shame that people in Flint have for being “this abandoned child from rich parents who have let them rejected and pauper.

I wanted them to be happy to be from Flint because I believe we at birth are given a package with easy, and hard things to work our spiritual path.

Life is this complicated maddening ride that’s takes you places you never expected. I never expected to have the sorrow for the child who die in my park the last Friday before summer school started. Nor I expected him to be the driving force for me to try to do something, for something desperately needs to changed in Flint .

And yet, I am connected to this killed child like I have never been to anybody in Flint because his death is a chilling reminder that somebody somewhere needs to listen to this children. Yes, children that have crossed the threshold of humanity and kill themselves for nothing; children that only understand violence to clean shame, and on and on and on.

I am not poor, nor African American; yet, I know deep in my bones what violence does to a family, to a generation, to a country. I am a child of the sixties and I lived in Argentina during the “Dirty War.” I went to an intellectual university lab-school where numerous teenagers disappeared or where killed by the military-http://desaparecidos.org/arg/. I know what jail and shame does to a family because my uncle Donisio Rafael Fagalde was a lawyer-http://www.geni.com/people/Rafael-Fagalde-Lopez/6000000011605861295 and was sequestered, tortured and  killed by the military July 1^st 1975 when I was 16 years old .

And I know what is to be a teenager and be surrounded by secrets, and death and cold violence that is the way you feel when somebody you know disappears, or get killed. I know what is to have your family picture in the newspapers one day, and understand that nobody wants to talk about “that the event,” ever after the second day.

I know what is to go to church, the important church in the city Sunday morning with all the “preppy people and they look at you at this contaminated person …full of mess and blood and death.”

I know how the media and everybody wants to portray crime and violence like two separate groups- one good, the other bad .When in reality things are more complex.

And so, maybe Antonio Jr. Bell is my new voice, teaching me to talk about violence and anger and teenagers.

I know he that in a very crazy, messy inexplicable way, he is helping me to turn Mott Park, on NO at the time.

Marta

Changing Mott Park, One NO at the Time

Flint MI, August 18, 2012

….

Dear Ms:

In response to our phone conversation, I want to educate you in one of the reasons why Flint is in the state of decay that it is.

Yes, there are mountains of challenges, but one of them and maybe one of the most important is that leaders like you always say no. They do not lead, they demoralize us.

No, poor children can not learn (this is what public school educators expect from kids from poor families in Flint).

No, poor families can not live in peace (this is what social worker expect from kids and families from chaotic backgrounds in Flint).

No, poor children can not evade violence and crime (this is what police expect from poor teenagers in the poor areas of the city of Flint).

No, neighborhoods can not improve (this is what City Hall expect from changing neighborhood in Flints, like our Mott Park).

Why is that No is the most preeminent word in Flint? It is a long story, but because in our particular case I am caring about my chaining neighborhood, I will tell you few things.

 

In our conversation you dismissed me completely without knowing at thing about me…why because in Flint we have very low expectations for people, and things are in a certain way even if we are sinking.

In reality, probably I have more experience in things related to my neighborhood than you, and surely, more education and ideas how to improve Mott Park than you. Why? because I have high expectations about Mott Park than you.

See, what you do not know is that

1)  I come from Tucuman, a city in Argentina, so I know to languages.

2)  I travel around the world, so I visit cities and always learn what work and does not.

3)  I have a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Tucuman.

4)  I have a Master’s in Education from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

5)   I worked with “Architecto Sacriste,” who was a very well regarded architect in Argentina.

6)  I was the student assistant for the class History of Architecture in the University of Tucuman, so probably I know more about old cities than you.

7)  I worked in Atlanta in different architectural offices.

8)  But the most telling, is when living in Atlanta, my best friend from Peru was an urban planner and was working at City Hall. I learned thru our multiple conversations what good leaders do. In a few years, with a great number of leaders Atlanta moved from the sleepy Southern town that nobody expected much to a great town that everybody wants move and live there. Why? Because they dare to say YES…

 

But that is not all, in reference of Mott Park, I was the president of the neighborhood for three years, and now, I buy houses and try to find good neighbors. I also clean the streets and take the weeds, and care for the park, and try to convince neighbors to stay and now I am working in stabilizing the neighborhood, so when somebody like you in a simple phone conversation reply: “ Don’t even think about it..”

I want to say to you and to all the leaders in Flint that I will change my neighborhood and the children in my neighborhood “one NO at the time.”

 

Until next time, reflect on how your negativity and lack of imagination to solve problems and you attitudes that are more negative than positive are hurting Flint.

 

Sincerely,

 

Marta

I Still Believe We are Good People at Heart…Mott Park

 

 The way to win the battle sometimes is to do

the unthinkable….

M W T

I get up every morning thinking who I will call and what person I sell my neighborhood because I believe a “neighborhood changed for bad could also go into the other direction and change for good.”

After all, it is change, and like energy, it can move in both directions.

• Noise and fight can become silent or laugh
• Walls can become bridges
• Despair can become possibilities

And so, I know that if we do exactly the opposite of what we are doing now things, as crazy as may seen, will give us the opposite results, the results we want.

Instead of alienation- that is what we have now; it could turn into belonging and participation.

This is an example of what can be done in Mott Park:

More rentals have given the neighborhood a tint of abandonment, not because we do not have people living in the house because we have, but because rentals have a way of behaving like they are not here. Is that subtle way in which they do not read the neighborhood magazine that languishes on their mailbox flags, or the branches of trees that stays forever on their sidewalks, or their garden unattended, etc.

The feeling of disinvestment is more palpable in the streets that are at the border of the neighborhood. The old owners have left the houses, the new owners care about squeezing the maximum profit by putting as little as possible back into those old houses. The renters who enter in contact with such group are desperate souls, and it shows. They have trash on their lawns and the sense of hopeless abound.

What do I do?

 I could blame A, or B, or C

For ruining my neighborhood; Yet,

I deliberative practice the opposite

I try two things:

1) I try to have great expectations for everyone, for I know they are blind to the beauty I see.

2) I try to engage then in respectful ways by make them feel that somebody sees them as part of Mott Park.

…

There was this little house that had accumulated trash for days in front of their home which became putrid. I was tired of seeing the trash on the same spot for days and decided to act. I decided to collect the trash.

The process of collecting the trash or correcting a particular behavior involves a little of acting and a little of exercising the spirit of collaboration:

To collect the trash-

1)   I dress beautifully like I am going to the mall because after all, I am doing something that will make my neighborhood beautiful.

2)   I go to the property and start collecting the trash and while doing it, I enter into a zen kind of attitude concentrating in the action of cleaning and nothing else (which will be criticizing the rentals and blaming everybody else)

3)   I put the trash in bags and take it to my home or a big dumpster.

4)   If I can, I also include cutting the weeds and cleaning the place.

5)   And when necessary, I buy a big trash can and bring it to them.

6)   I try to go in and out of the neighborhood thru that sad street and keep and eye on that house.

The next day, as I was leaving to do an errand, I passed by the house and a man was sitting on the steps of the door. I stopped and asked where the person who lives in the house was. In the conversation this is what I learned:

• The woman who lives there used to be a nurse
• She is on disability
• She is probably depress
• She probably has a substance abuse issue.

So now, that trash has an history, it is attached to a woman with limitations and issues, a woman that has few resources and is in trouble, a woman that is surrounded by people with more problems than her.

As you get poor, there is less resources, the scarcity makes everybody less welcoming and there is more stress. Things escalate from there: Poor people get robbed more often, poor people get treated like incapable most of the time. Poor people get abused in high numbers. Poor people get less support system when it comes to family, neighbors and the city. Poor people get treated with paternalistic attitudes, etc.

In an act of complete reverse psychology, I gave the man a trash can and put the new trash on the trash can while talking to him. I tell him that I will come often to see how things are going..the plan is make them feel that they are, even if it is a little, connected to Mott Park.

What I did is to repair the web of connections of the neighborhood- a little bit because a neighborhood is more than houses and alleys. It is a group of people living in proximity where the actions of one, like the paint on a canvas affects the rest.

Yes, I feel like a “herding dog,” moving the rich and the poor, the pretentious and the shameful, Kettering University and Saint John Vianney, the slumlord owner and City Hall to go to the same place that is a welcoming place where everybody can live in harmony.

Does it take a lot of time? Yes, Is it discouraging some times? Yes. But I refuse to enter in the drama of the No city that tends to be Flint. Why? because I know that Flint can be the YES city if we CARE.

Until next time, remember that is not money what will change this city but the unshakeable belief that we are good at heart, and that we can, one neighbor at the time.

Thanks

Marta

Flint Has Always Been a Poor Town, Even When Tens of GM Factories were around. Poverty is Lack of Choices and that Abounds in Flint.

Flint is per excellence the definition of poverty

You have heard about the terrible things that happen in Flint when no hope, anger, ignorance and humiliation get combusted in the mind of young men? They kill themselves for pennies or phrases or honor…And now that summer has started Flint, and is hot and no money for anything…well you get the picture.

But please, do not get nostalgic thinking that Flint was before in the past because the truth is that has never being. Flint has always been a poor city and that make everybody very very angry.

Poverty is always equated with money because money gives you option, is the currency of choice. But also poverty is the lack of and in town the lack of voice and choices is monumental. People here are still treated like less than or in other words like poor.

When I came here from Atlanta several moons ago, I was amazed at how much Flint had in terms of services like two library systems, a cultural center, universities like Kettering University, University of Michigan, Mott Community College, Baker College, etc. parks, the Flint River in the center of the town, etc.

So why Flint feels and looks like a poor town?  Why Flint looks like things are patched with tape and ready to break into pieces at any moment?

I know, I know people will get offended by this but Flint has two things that makes it a poor town. It has a mono industry that is controlled by few hands. And it has not diversification. It is the same that happen in towns that have gold or copper and a group extracting the material and people with very few options that to work in the mines or nothing.

In Flint, even in the boom times, Flint was like a mine town, and worse because it has all the pretensions of a great city. Flint has a car to build disposable hands to work. Yes, it pays good, but it treat people like disposable and that is why in Flint  you have so many factories and next to the factories bars and bars and bars like the wild west.

So, although people had worked they knew and the managers of the factories knew and the managers of banks knew that people did not have choices. They were poor. Or you work in the factories for a good pay or you languish in the streets because nobody will hire a person that does not know how to read or write or know only to put tires in cars because that is what has done all his life….So, people like all poor people are trapped and that is why in Flint that sense that there is no escape is something it enters in your breathing like the humidity of a basement. That is why you see the comments of people in the Flint Live that feel more like old lions in a circus- they could do is make noise.

Poverty is the lack of choices and Flintonians have very few choices available, and being a democratic demagogic town, in the name of public good, Flintonians have less options than other places.  Schools are bad and waste children’s time. School designed in the industrial revolution to keep children out of the streets, pass them and graduated them to work in the factories, when reading or math was not a necessity. Schools tracked few children and that that is why Mr. Walling was selected to receive all the goods, he was going to college while the other kids NO.

So now, with an industry that is not a mono industry that controls all the sources, and a populations that is passive aggressive and that has learned to be caged in a corner, and a few businesses that want to continue making all the decisions and treating people like discarded items, we have a long way to go.

It seems very difficult for the few business to understand the we are all in this together and when the poverty of Flitnt get to them, they want to build gates like is happening at Kettering University and Hurley Hospital

What is so degrading about poverty is that carries a sense of a plague and nobody wants to be close to poverty just in case the hole eat them too.

But poverty and the lack of choices in Flint is eating all of us because like I say poverty is the lack of and in Flint we have lack of so many thing it “produces more “lack of.”

So I hope that makes you think, for to change Flint we need a new definition of poverty and a new acceptance that to change this town we need more than tracked bright kids (who are completely disconnected of poverty….they were the lucky one that scape the fate of the town), and charity and the good intentions of people that want to help the poor by making sure the poor continue being poor and not become an economic force…

Until them think in all they ways you also are poor, just because you were born in Flint.

Marta

The Miseries of Poverty Compound When People Equate Poverty with Stupidity…No Wonder the Kids in Flint Are so Angry..

In Flint poverty is our dirty word…

MWT

Living in a changing neighborhood has its miseries because as the population of affluence moves to the suburbs, you are left with a mix of middle class and struggling lower class, and strange things start to happen.

Yes, the stores surrounding the neighborhood not only start catering to that demographic, yes we have a humongous pawn shop around the corner, a cash check area, a one dollars store and the like, the same employees of those stores start treating you like an stupid human being.

In general because I have car and money I shop in stores that treat me with decency, but today, I had to buy a cough syrup in one of the drug stores around home.

While I was waiting to pay, I was observing the behavior of the cashier that was between paternalistic and downright insulting. Yes, in front of me there was an old African American man buying something, but did he deserve the treatment of being consider poor and stupid?

I imagine that the woman at the cashier who already is and struggling poor person felt good about herself to explain things like we could not add or subtract.

At the center of the discussion of poverty in Flint, we have to talk about all behaviors which alienate poor young men, that have received so many times the same concept in their schools that are convince they are not useful for anythineaseg more than blew our city in pieces…

Who says that poverty equate stupidity?

Please,  move this city we need to believe that we can and that means believing that we have a brain which is like a muscle that can be exercise.

So, when you see a poor person that has problem reading and writing, it is not that are stupid, the need to practice a little bit more.

And please do me a favor, if you can shop in places that treat you like a thinking person.

Thanks,

Marta

Responding to the Flint Journal : Oh no, let me count the number of ways why I am pleased Mr. Brown and not Mr. Walling is handling Flint Affairs

 

Dear SIR:

Responding to the article about “Governor should have picked Walling as emergency manager,” I have to respond “Oh no, let me count the ways why I am very pleased Mr. Brown and not Mr. walling is handling Flints affairs thanks to Governor Snyder.

Humbly I have to accept that I made a great mistake when I helped Mr. Walling in two campaigns to become Mayor of Flint, for I equated brain and education with good leadership. I made also another mistake because I equate his coming back to Flint for caring for the underprivileged residents. After all, he was the bright kid that did well and was bringing all his experience to use.

The truth is that Mr. Walling is rather a poor leader that does not connect with poor people and does not have interest in understanding nor learning the forces of poverty and crime in Flint (persons below poverty level in Flint- percent 2006-2010 = 36.6 % US. Census Bureau- Flint).

Everybody knows that Flint has lost job, and lost tax revenues. And everybody who could leave Flint for a better job or opportunity is moving out. What is left, it is a pool of poor people with little hopes, and lot of anger and frustration, especially poor young African American teenagers.

So, when the Flint Journal wrote “this weekend’s crime shows that too many people in Flint have lost the value of human life-” said by Mayor Dayne Walling in response of the death of Tommy J. Vaughn, a 16-year old victim, I want to respond: It is so easy for Mr. Walling- a politician in power and in control of the city affairs to blame young teenagers for their rather bad choices of violence over life. Because the other way around will be much humble and somber for Mr. Walling the leader to ask. Why so many children are killing each other under my leadership in our city? Why there are so many guns in the streets and I do nothing to stop it? Why I keep so many liquor stores open when the city is dwelling in population? Why I do not declare the city in an emergency state of an epidemic of crime and humbly ask for help?

Since Mr. Walling has become the Mayor the situation with crime has deteriorated specially in his neighborhood the College Cultural, Glenwood neighborhood, and my neighborhood-the Mott Park neighborhood where another child this time 14 years old Antonio Jr Bell was killed in the park a week ago.

Should I feel frustrated? Of course. Should I be pleased Governor Snyder is trying to bring some order to this city that is run by teenagers out-of-control and leaders in denial?

We could die of negotiation with the unions for pensions and better jobs but if crime is a plague that is destroying the city by repealing possible business for coming and making families fly away taxes will continue decreasing. Without taxes from residents who support the city nothing moves. Even the salary of Mr. Walling is paid by our taxes.

When Mr. Jerome Dallas talks about the destruction of liberty in the city of Flint, I want to ask where are the rights of poor teenagers from Flint? The only thing they have which is very little and it is time, it is being wasted by superficial adult rhetoric and ego because at the end of the day, in Flint we have teenagers that are dead, teenagers that will end up the rest of their lives in jail and teenagers that will become a parasite of the society with low self-stem and very few abilities to work on good paying jobs because they are absolutely un-educated.

When Mr. Dallas Winegarden Jr. writes “we are protecting our children’s future in a free society that takes care of the safety, health and welfare of all the people, not just the rich and powerful,” I want to drive him around some areas in Flint so he could show me where is the health, safety and welfare of the poor children in Flint because I do not see it, and I do not need to drive very far from my home. The children in Flint have no voice because nobody is accountable for them and if Governor Snyder at least acknowledges that Flint has a problem is more than anybody has done for these children in a long, long time.

We can talk and talk about the tyranny of democracy and all the good words but the reality of Flint requires common sense and caring two things that Mr. Brown is well known for. Ended, Mr. Brown has solid credentials on caring for children and the poor. And his expertises in those areas are welcomed in a city with an abundance of poverty and problems created by poverty. Please read Mr. Brown experience with Red Cross, United Way, Youth counselor, at Wikipedia- Michael Brown.

Finally when Mr. Jerome Dallas Winegarden writes that we will not be surprised by the “horrible decisions Mr. Brown will make.” I want to say that I welcome Mr. Brown with open arms because he makes decisions that we need while Mr. Walling has done none.

And for Mr. Dallas Winegarden I suggest him to sell his expensive car and donate all the money to the poor children of Flint in that way, for sure, his father would truly be eternally proud of him.

Marta Wyngaard

In Flint, we want the “other child,” that killed Antonio Bell Jr to get looked in jail, so we could forget about this nightmare…and soon.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.
Mahatma Gandhi

When a child choose death over life at a young age of 14, what does it say about us society?

When and how are we passing this child the information that life is so cheap? Where has this child learned that disagreements are solved with blowing the brain of another child in few seconds?

When and how this child has understood that he was alone in this world and that his life hanged from the power and inexperience of another 14 year old teenager?

When society closes the loop with a simple equation of A+B+gun= death, then there is very little to add. The A+B+ gun becomes a given, something that we are not planning to analyze, nor ask the important questions that need to be answered. And so blame take a live into itself.

“He was not from Mott Park, maybe he was in drugs, maybe he was in something bad, maybe was his fault to listen to the other boy..”

The reality that nobody wants to uncover in Flint is much more complex. This child is dead because a mountain of little things that were supposed to go well went wrong and so, all this things added to a turning point  moving in a  direction that ended in an abysm.

So, I will, like I did today, keep searching for answers because this is what I have …his name, my park, his death, my sorrow, the unfairness of violence, and a desire to stop it forever!

Until next time, start seeing yourself as part of the solution, if not we will have a very sorrowful summer…

Marta

 

He does not live in Mott Park, doesn’t he? And in an strange way Antonio Bell Jr. will always be part of Mott Park…

That is what neighbors were comforting themselves after the death of Antonio Bell Jr. in our park.

Why? Because by making him a child that is not from here, it gives us permission not to worry anymore…he was not from here, he was from the poor area in town.

And so, his poverty does not infect our souls and we can continue pretending that poverty does not exist.

For me, that sheer of denial is broken, and although he was not my child, he will be in my soul for the rest of my life.

I have never seen him, and yet, his death as affected more than any words I can say, for I have a son who is fourteen and I cherish him like the most valuable treasure in my world.

And so, I am in a quest of ending violence in Flint for the poor youth in Flint…will I succeed? Who knows, the only thing I know is that if I continue thinking that he was not from here…he will never be.

And it is something I can not do…I can not walk in the park, the park I love so much, pretending nothing has happened. Mott Park, the place I have taken my children to play since they were little. In that same place violence has destroyed a child because …and the list is so long…because he was alone…because…violence is a way of life in Flint…because ..we adult care little about poor teenagers that live in Flint..etc.

And so, this young man who was a total stranger until yesterday has become my guidance to ask me to do something…it is time to do things different…it is time to see teenagers that are poor as children that have potential and that their lives are as valuable as any other child in Flint…could we say like the children who will attend Powers?

I am walking a path that is new to me, for I am not white, nor black, nor from here. Yet I can feel the anger, frustration, shame, desperation, of teenagers in Flint that have nothing to lose than their lives…isn’t that so absolutely sad…

Until next time, help me to think new ways to solve the problems of youth violence in Flint.

From the bottom of my heart,

Thanks

Marta