When my wife came home from work today to the dinner I had prepared I asked her how her day was. She said: “It was a long day.” I did not realize the full implications of her statement until watching the weather on TV news tonight. The weatherman said this was the longest day of the year with something like 15 hours and 22 minutes of sun light. It is the summer solace, the first day of summer. However, it is only 57 degrees outside now and tomorrow the high will be around 70 degrees. My tomato plants and other warm weather plants are waiting for hot weather to burst out and up. Will real summer ever come this year?

The flowers in the gardens and the orchids in the house are doing well. The peonies are fading away but some of the lilies are ready to bloom. Flowers come and go. Last year between March and October and this year between May and who knows. There is something timeless about climates and gardens. They change but just go on.

Today, with friends, I help some friends scrape and paint their house. This was something our friends really needed to do and with a little bit of help we got most of it done. Repairing a house, like painting, is not something that comes and goes naturally. It just comes with time and weather and stays or becomes worst, until you repair it.

An urban environment is like a house. It is something you must constantly work at. We all want a safe neighborhood, with good schools, high employment, good housing stock, in short, a neighborhood where it is easier to be good.

However, in Milwaukee we have bordered out part of the city, segregated by race and poverty living there. It is not a safe neighborhood, has high unemployment and has increasing number of slum landlords not taking care of houses they rent. North Central Milwaukee is an environment where it is hard to be good. It is an area surrounded by an invisible wall where the city, county and state can just neglect.

In fact, mass transit, has severely been reduced in this area where many people do not own a car. Mass transit money is going to road projects for cars, like the proposed two billion dollar expansion of the expressway near my house so people in suburbs and get in and out of city, for ballgames, basketball games, entertainment and eating establishments, cultural places like the theaters, museum, Hawley Davidson museum and Casino without traveling any city streets. We do not have any mass transportation system, like trains, between city and suburbs where most of the jobs are. This racial and poverty segregation, unlike the gardens is not natural. It is like in Milwaukee County we live in one big house and we just neglect an area of the house and found news ways around. If you check out M.A.P.S, Maps of Segregation, Poverty, Criminalization of African Americans you can visually see what we are talking about. You will also notice an area on the South Central side with also high unemployment, poverty and segregation. This is the area where many Hispanics live or are assigned to.

We now call it racial segregation. In the 60’s when it was not as pronounced and severe as it is today we call it racism. Whatever you call it. the truth is that we have all created areas of the city that are neglected and ignored, where poverty reigns and it is very hard to be good, like so many of the blessed people who live there are. We do not need to go to foreign countries to experience poverty, hunger, and houses in bad shape without refrigerator, stoves, beds and furniture. Just come to North Central Milwaukee, walk the streets, meet the many wonderful people that live there, visit their homes and, most important of all, become friends. How many friends do you have that live in a disastrous human made environment?

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