The PBS NewsHour recently ran a piece about a kitchen gardening program for preschoolers in none other than the sweet home of Kirk Siegler’s Latinos who actually identify as Hispanics and by the way the bus system shuts down at 5:00 pm. When I heard the teaser for the segment at the beginning of the broadcast, I assumed that the town in question was some hella remote washed-up dump of twenty-five or fifty thousand on the High Plains or doped-up mill town in Kentucky the width of its hollow. That is, a place small enough for a physically fit person without a tight schedule to manageably navigate by foot. It never crossed my mind that a city the size of Pueblo would have such a shitty bus system. Based just on its population and geography it should easily be able to support service until eight or nine in the evening, and all day on Saturdays and Sundays if the local authorities give a shit. A city as poor as Pueblo should have an especially easy time keeping ridership high enough to justify the system. What else are the pobrecitos gonna do? Hump forty pounds of shit a piece back across town from Walmart?
Instead, Pueblo has a transit system that easily vies for worst in class, as well as an obesity rate high enough to alarm the public health types and a barrio without a supermarket. One of the guys the NewsHour interviewed pointed out a Dollar General and described it as the main shopping spot in the neighborhood because there’s no longer a grocery store on the East Side. Again, this is in a city of 110,000. We aren’t talking about the east side of Holdrege or Limon or fucking Nicodemus not having its own King Soopers. We’re talking about a entire heavily populated sector of a middling city not having a supermarket. Taking a look at Google Maps, I can tell that dude wasn’t exaggerating by much. I’m finding a taqueria, an Asian market, and, a couple of miles away, on the other end of the Lower East Side, something called Mea’s Edibles. That’s it. Google-fu exposes the opportunity to go grocery shopping at a taqueria.
That’s a genuine food desert. It must be inconvenient for older women living in the Badlands to haul carts full of groceries from the Reading Terminal Market onto the 61 bus, and it’s a shame that their neighborhoods don’t have decent grocery stores, but at least they’ve got SEPTA. At least they’ve got a comprehensive, basically adequate city bus system to get them to and from better neighborhoods so they aren’t stuck buying overpriced shit from some ramshackle corner store. Other shit can go wrong in Philadelphia, and there are some real war zone neighborhoods where it reliably will, but at least they don’t have to worry about the bus system closing down for the evening right around when the farmer’s market does.
We have in this country no telling how many government programs to arrange, subsidize, and guarantee business loans, waive property taxes for allegedly crucial businesses, and so forth, and yet no one at any level of government with jurisdiction over Pueblo has figured out how to get their thumbs out of their asses and structure some arrangement to backstop the operations of an established grocer in what would be, practically, a captive market of thousands of residents. The half billion plus that Sacramento dropped on that fucking downtown arena would pay for the effectively perpetual operations of City Market in the City Part of Town. That episode was about a kid getting a damn job already. A supermarket would bring in local jobs. Besides, a grocery store will inevitably have revenue if it doesn’t just give all the food away for free, so any government subsidy would be only partial.
Of course, I’m missing the key points here. The Lower East Side isn’t the kind of neighborhood where City Hall takes constituents’ grievances seriously. It’s the kind of neighborhood where City Hall seizes and bulldozes pobrecitos’ precious homes to make way for the new ballpark. I’ve seen that movie before, in York. *Ed Weinstock Voice, narrating the local traditions (TM)* Rootin’ for the Revs, because we live here, too. No, more like Ed Whinestock, am I right.
It’s urban renewal, bitch. It isn’t vitalized if the poor are the ones walking around the hood with vital signs. The Supreme Court has ruled that it’s lawful for the redevelopment authority to seize your house so that some mobbed-up sleazeball can cobble together the space for a downtown casino, whether or not anyone actually has the funding and the coordination to actually build it. The real process isn’t the formal one in which some retired school janitor whose rowhouse is needed for the new arena gets dogpiled by the developers and its pet city council in court, but the openly equity-optional political process, in which the neighborhoods with the money, the voter turnout, and the overall juice to clearly articulate their promise to seriously fuck shit up for anyone who messes with their neighborhood. These loudmouths are the font of recall elections, and City Hall knows it.
Pueblo theoretically could have decent bus service. Instead it has a program to impress toddlers into child agricultural labor so that they can have some lunch. I’m mainly being descriptive here. I’m not trying to wax all OMG think of the welfare of the precious children or suggest that the little ones are working on a chain gang, but it was striking to watch children who have barely figured out how to walk being taught to pick corn because otherwise they won’t have a decent thing to eat.
Getting them into gardening early isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but then again, I didn’t really learn my way around a grapevine until I was in my twenties, and I know what the fuck I’m doing on farms. I have no fucking idea if the gardening education will keep the kiddos from getting fat. Crunchy moralists in the Palo Alto public school system feeding us creamy peanut butter on celery sticks didn’t stop me from filling out at any number of ages, since I licked the sweet stuff out of the crack (as he, she, and shit said), threw the celery in the trash when the authority figures weren’t looking because I didn’t need to discover anew that it tasted like shit, and ate, like, half a dozen mini Kit-Kats tonight after a triple helping of tofu and eggplant curries for dinner. The only thing I’m blaming the Palo Alto schools for here is the fucking celery, not because I’m now fat, but because assholes who pretended to understand nutrition tried to make me eat one of the world’s shittiest vegetables. I’m fat because of the Kit-Kats and the Tsingtao, among other tasties. That, and I tend to be Extremely Online and have recently been living under a family dynamic not so conducive to exercise.
What the hell is early childhood intervention worth, then? Probably jack shit. I mean, we don’t want our brats looking like little One Child Policy Chinamen, so it makes sense to see if they can’t handle some exericse and stomach some vegetables, but there’s nothing wrong with a cracker telling Jamie Oliver to pound sand and take his healthier-than-thou act back to the Home Cunties. Gee, did I just write something in error? I think nut! The Pueblo thing, though, is frankly kind of sad. The funding is there to staff up an operation to hold children below any possible age of moral responsibility by the hand through a bunch of gardening exercises but not to staff up a damn neighborhood grocery, and that’s pathetic. That’s a blatant sign of a dysfunctional, unresponsive, unaccountable government. The school district having its act together on early childhood education doesn’t excuse the rest of the city and county government for being a dumpster fire. They’re failing grievously on public transportation, urban planning, economic development, and who knows what all else.
These kids will graduate, or drop out, into the jurisdiction of governments that won’t do jack shit for them as constituents. They’re getting the early childhood enrichment, but then what? I graduated from a prep school and then from a college that keeps injuring its neck from looking down its nose, and I’m recurrently in some state of homelessness and poor job prospects. Agree however earnestly you like with Melania Trump about the children being our future, but try for a moment to think through what’s so fucking impossible about providing a similar level of services to the grown-ass adults, our present.
Then again, if the local government is funding Head Start stoop labor studies for kids who aren’t exactly mature enough to stand up straight instead of its bus system, we’re probably dealing with a crippling scarcity mentality. And in this case it is a mentality. Four levels of government and the dozens of agencies operating within them don’t all run out of crosstown bus money and seed money for some neighborhood grocery stores. It isn’t like, gee, looks like I need to sleep in my car because I just spent $500 on airport parking, but maybe I can go up to Donner Pass and get a hike out of the deal. Not a damn chance. If the City of Pueblo is insolvent, it isn’t stuck with a $2,500 limit on its credit card plus whatever it can get month to month from mom and dad. Why do you suppose we have Congressmen?
My bad; that’s so the Democratic Congressional leadership can insist on paying Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen into the stone age. Grit is what it takes to turn a country into grit. Values: Pass It On.
What we’re looking at in Pueblo is a perfectly soluble government funding shortfall entrenched by a chronically insoluble political problem. The money is damn well there; it’s just that those who need it don’t have the political organization and muscle to name it and claim it. The NewsHour touched on the extreme dysfunction involved but didn’t look closely at it. NPR, of course, did ever so much worse by dispatching Kirk Siegler to discover Latinos who are actually Hispanics because, being Hispanics, they really believe in hard work and let’s not think about what happened to the steel mill.
At least if I go up to Addison and get called a white motherfucker, it’s because a very other brother by a very other mother wants to get me on the train for free. That isn’t racism; it’s state-subsidized small business. I hate ripping off transit agencies that run trains all night every night, but I’d sooner fly the W for Free Fare for Whitey than for a home on the range transit agency that isn’t even worth ripping off. Rahmbo and the gang milk the hell out of Chicago, but that’s because Chicago is healthy enough to be milked.
It’s time to get Blagojevich out on furlough for the swing shift.
Murica Derp 