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Our region, fit to print: First world problems in Doylestown, everyday gun violence for Camden
Two front page articles offer a sad if unintentionally sardonic illustration of the different worlds Americans live in. In Camden, a nine-year old boy was blinded by a stray bullet. In suburban Doylestown, a small number of neighbors are grumpy about the town''s First Friday art walk.
Our region, fit to print: First world problems in Doylestown, everyday gun violence for Camden
On Thursday, I wrote about new Brown University study findings that the Philadelphia area is by many counts the nation’s most separate and unequal. Regardless of class, black and Latinos attend much worse schools than their white counterparts and live in far more impoverished neighborhoods.
Two articles on the front page of this week’s Sunday Inquirer--one moving, the other mundane--offer a sad if unintentionally sardonic illustration of the different worlds Americans live in. In Camden--one of the country’s poorest and most violent cities--a nine-year old boy was blinded by a stray bullet that missed his brain by millimeters. In suburban Doylestown, the news was this: a small number of neighbors are grumpy about the town's First Friday art walk, charging that “the 6-year-old event has exploded beyond the town's capacity, drawing thousands of outsiders who make noise, clog sidewalks and streets, gobble up the locals' parking, and unleash ‘roving bands of teens’ who wander unsupervised.”
Are gangs walking the streets, carrying out violent flash mobs? No, there haven’t been any crimes committed or anything. A handful of locals just, you know, find it a bit too noisy, and so they founded a Facebook group that now has, umm, 41 members (journalists included).
U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Ludwig, who moonlights as president of the Doylestown Historical Society, sees the event as manifesting a dark, suburban underbelly. The town center, he writes, “sometimes seems like a ‘war zone’--to be avoided by those who have a right to be here.”
Our hearts go out to Judge Ludwig and the others who brave the mean streets of Doylestown during their afterwork shopping. Meanwhile, Camden is a war zone.
“Jorge, who prefers the Anglo pronunciation ‘George,’ was walking home through East Camden to feed his pet parakeets when a bullet sliced through his temple, damaging optic-nerve fibers behind his right eye and exiting through his left.”
He panics waking up blind in the hospital. “Where’s my eyes? Where’s my eyes? I can’t see!”
“On the afternoon of Monday, June 27, Jorge became one of the 103 people who have been shot in Camden in the first seven months of 2011--up 24 percent for the same period last year.”
The two front-page stories say a lot about each place. But together, the suburban and urban articles tell a bigger story about what’s gone wrong with our region--and, probably, with America.
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