my own chicago tour

So... I chose some high schools that were spread around the near-south, southwest and west sides, and had google make me an itinerary to drive by all of them.

Took me close to three hours... went down to the grand old campuses of Dunbar and DuSable, which have graduated all sorts of famous people since the mid-19th century and are now being re-envisioned as "small schools" within one building... drove across to the Latino neighborhood out by Cermak & Cicero... then up and under the Ike to another Black neighborhood just this side of Oak Park (that was freaky, when I took a wrong turn and tumbled out of the projects & churches into mansions and lawns like Alice tumbling out of the rabbit-hole)... and then on back home.

Wow.

First of all, there are a lot of poor people in Chicago, and it isn't a pretty sight. Faces and bodies beaten and battered, lined with care, jumping at noises or slumping in corners. I have spent a good bit of time in poor neighborhoods in the U.S., but not recently... I guess I'd forgotten.

Of course there were families hanging on stoops and children playing in fire hydrants, but also blocks & blocks of dead factories and boarded up shops, only the liquor stores open for business.

The Latino neighborhoods were much less depressing - plenty of beauty shops and taquerias, small neighborhood enterprises and larger shopping centers too. I asked R why it's like that and she said it's pure racism - people won't make loans to would-be Black small business owners, and don't open stores in those neighborhoods.

Anyway.

I had two reactions... well I had a lot of reactions but I'll discuss two. First, it was hard to tell what I was actually seeing and what was just my own projections. I tried to make myself look for the little details that convey genuine information - flowers in window-boxes and lawn ornaments or plantings in the front yard mean the neighborhood isn't really that bad; bars on the windows, stripped cars on the streets, garbage everywhere mean it is. (I didn't see many blocks that were that bad - and heck, I lived on blocks like that in NYC!)

Second, driving that vast area - according to Google I drove forty miles - made it really clear what my place is in the scheme of it all - specifically - very small. The people on the stoops and corners, in the taquerias and auto body shops, they aren't waiting for me to come and save them. Their lives will go on much the same whether I teach in their neighborhood or not.

I've talked w my therapist (aka OLIF) about how to have good boundaries with my work, not try to save the world at the cost of my health and sanity, etc. This little drive actually really helped with that. It was clear that I should choose a job based on what will be fulfilling for me.

I love to teach students who struggle with different kinds of obstacles or challenges, but I will choose a job with those students because I love it, not because I harbor delusions of being some kind of savior or messiah. There are miles and miles and miles of those students and I will not make a dent in the big picture (if I do it will be through activism in some other realm).

But hopefully I will have a fulfilling and interesting job for the rest of my life, and hopefully there will be some whose lives will be better because of me, and that's good enough.

Still processing all this...