Alderman's office, Buffalo Grove, Foster Beach

Ramblings...

Last Wednesday evening I attended Alderman Smith's monthly Planning and Zoning (P&Z) meeting, which was held at her office. The meeting is Mary Ann Smith's way of giving 48th Ward residents a democratic forum for weighing in on neighborhood development and other issues. But as I looked around the room, I was struck by a question: Where are my neighbors? The room was filled with old white folks. Not that there's anything wrong with being an old, white folk, but if I were to walk down my street, I'd see plenty of people who don't look or talk like me: Hispanics, a good number of African-Americans, plus Asians, Indians, Russians, Albanians, etc. The absence of these people from the alderman's meeting made me wonder just how democratic all this really was.

The big topic of the evening was CPAN, an affordable housing initiative; the attendees, consisting primarily of the economic elite of the Ward, couldn't get past their fear of government's intrusion into the housing market, and so no vote was taken regarding a formal CPAN set-aside plan. There were a few African-Americans present, one of whom spoke eloquently in favor of affordable housing.

The following evening was band practice in the affluent suburb of Buffalo Grove, the last rehearsal before the July 4th concert. At one point when I had fifteen bars rest, I looked around at the other musicians in the band: seventy players, and not a single dark face among them. And I thought of the people in my neighborhood -- those who have lived their lives in poverty, those whose English is poor, those who are mentally ill, those who cannot walk, those who have had little education, those whose opportunities are limited by prior run-ins with the law. It dawned on me that the people in my band are so far removed from what exists in my neighborhood that there is little chance for them to really understand it. They simply have no exposure to these things.

Sunday I took a walk along the lakefront. I headed south from Foster Beach in search of a mango vendor. One thing you'll notice around Foster Beach is that no one speaks English, including the mango vendor. If you want a mango, you have to say, "Un MAHN-go, por favor." And then you give the man dos dólares.

Just my dos centavos.