Detroit? Isn't that the city that's always on fire?

I defend Detroit. I defend it against my suburban neighbors and ward members who look at me with pity and fear when I tell them I teach downtown. I defended it against my mother who, for the first year I lived here, was convinced I was going to be knifed and/or shot at any given moment. I defend it here on my blog, trying to give the sense that it’s a conflicted but interesting place to be and not worthy of the derision it gets in the national media.

(For the record, that brawl in the stands at the Pistons game that took place a couple of years ago? That happened in Auburn Hills, not Detroit. Auburn Hills is so white that if the Pistons didn’t play there, there wouldn’t be any black people in that city at all.)

Anyway, even though I take pride in my messed-up adopted city, there are times there’s nothing I can do, no way I can speak up for it. By now, if you’ve been watching the news, you already know about our Mayor’s problems. There are plenty of lessons we can learn such as don’t cheat on your spouse, don’t send personal text messages on a device owned and paid for by the city, and, very importantly, don’t lie under oath on the stand in a case that already makes you look like a completely corrupt idiot. These are lessons we can learn – but sadly, I don’t think Kwame learned them in time. (By the way, I’m counting the seconds until some future-Pulitzer-Prize-winning genius dubs this whole mess something original like “Text-gate.”)



So there’s that but, additionally, I had an experience yesterday that just sort of soured me on this city.

At lunchtime, I walked outside to run an errand. In the parking lot of our school, I saw Gil’s (one of our construction trainers) van parked off to the side with some of our students parked nearby and one student on his back, reaching under the vehicle. It was strange but I didn’t think too much of it. Until, that is, I got close enough to realize that the guys around Gil’s van weren’t our students. In fact, I didn’t recognize them at all. They saw me see them and the guy under the van casually got up, brushed himself off, got in the car that was waiting nearby, and they all drove off together. Something was clearly up so I memorized the license plate number and called Gil.

It turns out that these guys were trying to cut the catalytic converter right out from underneath the van. Apparently, there’s a substance inside called palladium that thieves can pull out and sell for a hundred dollars an ounce. So in broad daylight, beside a busy street, in a private parking lot, a gang of thieves was using a saw to steal from my co-worker. According to Gil, I walked up just in time. The converter was still there, hanging on by a thread more or less. He took it to a buddy who welded it back together and called the cops to file a report.



Sigh. Detroit, I try to give you the benefit of doubt. I try to persuade people that you’re not composed of criminals and pimps. I try to persuade them that much of what is thought, said, and written about this city isn’t true. I try to believe it myself. But some days, days when our Mayor is (once again or still, depending on how you look at it) mired in scandal, days when crime is committed right in front of me for nothing more than a couple hundred bucks, some days it’s harder than others to convince myself that this place wouldn’t be improved by being scraped down to the dirt and rebuilt from the ground up.

P.S. The title of this post comes from a school friend. When she told her mom she was moving here, her mom thought for a moment and then, as though she'd suddenly placed the city on her internal map, said, "Detroit? Isn't that the city that's always on fire?"