I've been home for three weeks and preoccupied with the state of the city. The contrast between Little Rock and Fayetteville used to be amusing; now it's a source of dark musings about things to come.
I'd like to invite all of the concerned liberal-minded people who speak of "growing wealth inequality" to give up their distant travels and stay home next summer; that is, stay in Arkansas, and for travel embed in another part of Arkansas for as long as your usual vacation or sight-seeing trip.
The obvious benefit is to the Earth's atmosphere. A round trip by plane (one seat in economy class) from Little Rock to Sydney, Australia, comes with a price tag of 3.85 metric tons of carbon dioxide; for comparison, carbon dioxide emissions in Sweden amount to 3.6 metric tons per person per year. In the United States it's about 14.9.
(For those contemplating a trip to Sweden in order to come home praising the Swedes' enlightened and environmentally friendly ways: A round trip from Little Rock to Stockholm comes out at 2.1 metric tons of CO2.)
But I'm more interested in one of the subtle slow-working benefits that the alert citizen can expect from embedding in another community in Arkansas: "Growing wealth inequality" will cease to be an abstraction. It will cease to be a phrase from the ever-evolving progressive catechism. Park your electric vehicle for a few days, walk around, look around, eat, drink, and talk to people, and the abstraction will be replaced by visible, audible, palpable realities.
Statistics will be replaced by felt contrasts, and if your home community is relatively impoverished, some of the contrasts will be painful.
Here in the freest and richest country in the history of the world, our first responsibility is the vigilant exercise of individual choice.
Inattentive exercise of choice abounds. I think of a bumper sticker I saw affixed to a newer-looking Subaru: "2028 is too late: vote climate!" The owner has obviously chosen to purchase a car within the last decade; is the idea to vote to have the choice taken away? A boot clamped on the car?
Likewise with the use of school vouchers to pay tuition at private schools that are better than but not fundamentally different from existing public schools. Why aren't parents pooling voucher money and starting their own schools? Where is the independent spirit? Where is the initiative? If the history of federal subsidies to higher education is any example, the vouchers will just fund an administrative expansion that will drive up tuition costs, thus canceling any benefit to future tuition payers.
Individual initiative and the vigilant exercise of choice must remain at--or return to--the heart of our daily lives and our big ambitions, but individual initiative can't go far when it's unsafe to cross the street or when your third-grade teacher won't sit down next to you with an open book to tackle the fact that you can't read. These are community matters, having everything to do with the way we spend communal money (tax dollars) and whether or not individuals have a chance to flourish.
So when we consider the general welfare, it would be healthy to move our thoughts away from statistics about per-capita income or household wealth toward close scrutiny of the relative wealth or impoverishment of communities that we actually know.
Hence my proposal that folks with the means to take a vacation stay in Arkansas and get to know several communities within the state. Walk around and observe. Contrasts will emerge, and so will some hard questions.
One morning last week I stopped in front of the Pike-Fletcher-Terry mansion to watch the sunrise play on one of the bois d'arc (bodark) trees, and stayed to watch a possum nose around on the grounds. I proceeded west on Seventh towards the beige brick high-rise district (Buffington Towers, the Donaghey Building, and the old Albert Pike Hotel--from a certain angle they remind me of the Upper East Side of Manhattan) and had a pleasant exchange with a man headed west. It ended with his asking, "You know my name, don't you?"
"No," I replied.
"Jimmy-Jam. Jimmy-Jam don't give a damn."
Which might also be said of our city government, because the bag of leaves and pile of dry brush that lay on Seventh Street that morning were still there as the sunrise broke through the clouds today.
The trash can at the southwest corner of Cumberland and Sixth, near the bus station, was close to overflowing a few days ago. It's close to overflowing still. Litter is everywhere downtown and lamentable in its own right, but yard waste placed on a curb and not picked up, trash placed in a designated receptacle and not picked up--these are testaments to another level of indifference, another level of neglect.
Is the city's Solid Waste department underfunded? "We're underfunded" is the standard response when any community-funded service (including public education) fails to serve. It came up recently in my conversation with the PR person for Rock Region Metro. She's a friend, and the reason I got in touch is also indicative of the state of basic services in our city, as well as our cultural and spiritual impoverishment.
I try to use public transportation, and it's convenient to catch the Pulaski Heights No. 1 bus from Hillcrest back downtown if I'm tired after a walk. The other morning, because of a glitch in the Metro's mobile app, I thought no inbound bus was to pass the Kavanaugh/Cedar Street stop for 35 minutes, so I walked by it and had made it 80 feet (two bus lengths) when I heard the bus approaching from behind, turned around and ran toward the bus, clearly visible, and waved to indicate that I wanted to board.
The bus passed me, then stopped exactly 84 feet from the designated bus stop at the new four-way stop at Kavanaugh and Woodlawn. I turned and ran in that direction and got close enough to the door to hear the driver's angry scream: "This is not a bus stop!"
And on went the bus. I walked home.