Jackson's Cure

How do we save a city in the throes of blight? This has been the omnipresent question for the last 20 years facing residents and public officials here in Jackson. And, yet, how successful have we been?

Just ask your neighbors. It seems everyone has a complaint and a suggestion. If only we'd pave our roads, they say. If the rich white folks hadn't left. If the schools were better. Crime needs to be lower. Buildings are in disrepair. The public officials are corrupt or incompetent. The residents are lazy or apathetic.

And the Monday morning quarterbacking continues.

From a distinctly psychological perspective, placing blame seems to assuage our guilt or our pain with what has happened in the city that we love. When I place blame, then I don't have to feel bad about myself. Someone else get's the pleasure of my dumping on them. Suggestions help us to think we're doing something good; that we're contributing in a meaningful way.

So long as its their problem, then we rest on our mighty thrones proffering solutions that the imbeciles just refuse to accept. Ah, its good to know it all.

Jackson's cure is not in the many solutions we can invent nor in the myriad of ways we can find blame. That's all been done.

Jackson will be cured when we all feel - from Madison to inner city Jackson to Clinton to Belhaven - a sense of community attachment. We must feel inextricably linked to the neccessity of the urban community and the success of its people. But, right now we don't. Instead, we feel attachment to our family, our Church, and sometimes our work.

But, what about about our city? We spend 8 hours - or more - at work, countless hours with our family, and a few at our Church. How many hours do we think about and work on our community? Sure, we can say that we pay taxes for other folks to do that, but that answer assuages our sense of responsibility.

They say when one does the same thing over and over again and expects the same results, then that is a marker of insanity. Well, where has blame and the flooding of surface level solutions gotten us over the years? I guess somewhere, but not where we want to be.

Looking inward and feeling attached - bound even - to Jackson may just be our best bet at generating some outward signs of recovery.