The beginning of Wale’s song starts off with George from Seinfeld saying “I don’t want hope; hope is killing me. My dream is to become hopeless. / When you’re hopeless you don’t care, and when you don’t care, that indifference, it makes you attractive.” The song is about the sense of hopelessness in people’s life’s and I think that sense of hopelessness can apply to how a lot of residents feel about the “revitalization” of Detroit.
Nobody wanted Detroit until the people who lived here were silenced. The (unconstitutional) silencing of residents is what made Detroit attractive to investors and pioneers and Danny Gilbert. Since they didn’t care about what actually happened to the people who lived here they waited until the city was “safe” for their investments and their billionaire friends, to actually take a look at what they could do to (not for) the city. Residents know that all the new condos and new developments in the city are not for us. Hockey town is not for us. Belle Isle is no longer for us, and pretty soon the River Walk will be snatched from us too.
But what can we do? Our elected representatives have no power under emergency management, our mayor is working to usher in a New Detroit forgetting all the people in Old Detroit, our city assets are being sold off, and while billionaires run around the city building soccer and hockey stadiums.
I don’t see all this revitalization through the same glasses as the family that now feels safe enough to travel downtown to watch the Tigers lose for 100th time, I see it through some pretty over policed, under recognized pessimistic glasses. Even though I don’t know exactly what to do to help my fellow Detroiters (yet) I still recognize how important it is to stand up to these huge problems and push back, it gets hard sometimes.
