Not Your Typical Tchotchke

My dear friend Dan Rodricks stated in his 29 July 2009 Baltimore Sun column: "So most of us go about our business - aware of, but not much engaged in, that other Baltimore immersed in the heroin-and-cocaine scene." Respectfully, I couldn't agree less. In ways both obvious and insidious, we’re all prisoners of this plague.

I returned on 20 July 2009 from a five-day swing through Wisconsin, including three delightful days in Milwaukee that forever altered my view of urban business-as-usual. Expecting a definitive escape from the day-to-day only in the two spent in dairyland, I instead neither saw nor heard trash in multiple economically-challenged Milwaukee neighborhoods, never worried about guns and gangs, never saw the despair drugs inflict on a community. This Rust Belt city simply blew me away - ultra-clean, safe, sophisticated, prosperous, and hip. Flowers abound and nothing's nailed down. All seem in on the secret that civility and tourism go hand in hand - and it's obvious those tourism dollars are funding way more than drug treatment and prosecution.

I completely agree with Dan's statement: "Most of the time, we move about this city with eyes wide shut to the reports of shootings and killings; we love this town, but it's often necessary to look past its problems in order to maintain our relationship with it." But now that a summer of gangs and gunfire at Harborplace have merited a tepid response, at best, from those at the top, I'm not so sure of the rest of his thought: "And, unless you live in one of the poorest neighborhoods, where the reality includes gunfire, and unless you are involved in the drug trade, your chances of being a victim of a homicide are low." I'm responding as a person who habitually traverses, alone and unafraid, any part of this city. Perhaps I should re-think that routine.

The awareness that the drug culture affects almost every aspect of how we live and (try to) do business in Baltimore is such a sad souvenir of my trip and a month later, I am still turning this thing over, furious and frustrated that my beloved native town seems forever, intractably held hostage by drugs.