Potholes and Patriotism

Day laborers sat in the brown grass under spare trees and on sidewalks in the shadow of whitewashed buildings near the Fruitvale Goodwill shop where I had just dropped off a donation of clothes and suitcases. I wished I had more money and some work for the men at my apartment but I didn't. So, I drove on, shaking my head no when two men waved at me. 

I turned onto 35th Street, a long thoroughfare that runs up the middle of a corridor of Oakland that connects the flatlands and Fruitvale BART station with Holy Names University and Merritt College up in the hills. I had made this run many times but on this hot July morning I began to notice how ragged the street was. I followed the path of a white pickup truck as it swerved sharply to dodge a deep hole. I realized that this was a street of dangerous potholes connected by occasional short strips of flat asphalt.

I observed that the street was also narrower than I had remembered and in the entire five miles I traveled there were no grocery stores except a few neighborhood corner stores, where a gallon of milk costs as much as a gallon of gasoline and over-priced sugary and salty snacks are plentiful. 

As I drove north, past a corner decorated with balloons and fresh flowers to commemorate the fatal shooting of a young man just days earlier, things began to change dramatically. The street suddenly widened to four lanes lined with well-trimmed trees as I approached MacArthur Boulevard. I decided to count potholes as I proceeded through Redwood Heights with its $750,000 homes. There were none to count.

I thought of the time I saw Jerry Brown, then Oakland's mayor, talking to a group of women dressed in smart tennis outfits and sipping lattes in a tony restaurant. One of them teased him about the potholes in her neighborhood. The mayor teased back, "What you do about those potholes is you drive around them." It was a good joke but I noted that he also asked the woman where she lived. My bet is that before those women gathered for their next Saturday breakfast a city crew would visit their neighborhood and patch up those potholes. Now, as I continued my drive, it was obvious that no one in the lower part of 35th Street had seen a city crew in years.

So this is my Oakland today -- a diverse community rich in many cultures but also a city that reflects one of the most glaring maladies of an ailing America -- the widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The juxtaposition of one choppy and neglected street against the smooth and well-attended boulevard on the hill is repeated time and again throughout the land. And it seems to me this is an ominous sign -- as ominous as the widening hole in the ozone. We need to heed these differences. We must. Those of us living along the smooth streets need to start raising hell about the potholes and collapsing infrastructure in the other part of town. We need to raise hell because if we don't, there is anarchy or worse waiting around the corner. More importantly, we need to raise hell simply because it is the right and the American thing to do.