Imaginary Geography

This walk was quiet.  There were only 3 of us this week, and the weather was so glorious, it was hard to stay focused on prayer.  We stopped across the street from Holcim Trading, Inc.  We prayed for growth, renewal, and re-purpose for the closed concrete plants and quarries in Mason City, recognizing how unemployment and the atrophy of manufacturing have led to a sense of decay and loss throughout the town.

Our conversation and prayers then turned to landlords, tenants and the City Council.  I had to follow up and read articles in the Globe Gazette and North Iowa Today about ideas for economic development and community improvement, and I was struck, yet again, about the public conversation surrounding "The North End."  I realized that humans seem to create an internal geography: a place where we put all the dangers that people our thoughts.  We put drug dealers, child abductors, car accidents, gun violence, domestic disturbance, tattoos, and lunatics into this imaginary zone.  Then we give it a name-something that says "wrong side of the tracks," something like "The Red Apartments" or "The North End."  Somehow, that allows us to get in our cars and go to work, the mall, or the park.  It allows us to feel safe enough to leave our homes and to converse with other people.  Even if we end up experiencing something unpleasant, we can move it out of our own neighborhood and into the dangerous part of town in our minds.

Unfortunately, we associate that internal geography-that made up place-with real geography.  We start to apply our fears and prejudices about that internal space to the real places and the real people that live in them.  Then, we start to treat those real places and those real people with distrust, disrespect, and fear.  Our neighbors, who never lived in that run-down slum in our mind, become undesirables, and somehow, we start talking about citizens and tenants as though the two groups were mutually exclusive.  We start writing articles in our local paper where we say that it is OK to "discriminate" against people who have a past.

“The law is clear. Landlords can’t discriminate on the basis of race or creed or color but they can on the basis of criminal record,” -(Globe Gazette, Sept. 1, 2012)

I have been walking the real "North End," and it does not look different than the "South End."  I live in one of the swanker parts of town, and there is a registered sex offender who lives on my block*.  I am related to people with criminal records, and I hope they can always find a clean, dry roof under which to live.  As long as we continue to live in the imaginary geography of fear, we will never find ways to live into a better future together.  As long as we lay all of the burden of shame and economic failure on the backs of people we think of as "less worthy" than ourselves, we will never move into new modes of economic viability or community health.

My prayer this week has been for more people to walk the streets of Mason City, for more people to learn the stories of their neighbors' lives and for more of us to take initiative in addressing those people who actually are causing us harm-rather than consigning whole chunks of a town and whole segments of a population to an imaginary zone of barbed wire and search lights where no motive can be trusted and the hope of redemption has never been born.

(* Since publishing this post, it has been brought to my attention that there is no longer a registered sex offender living in my immediate neighborhood.  Though this does not change the theme and point of this post, it is important to me to remain accurate, to the best of my ability, in my depictions of this town I call home.)  

 

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