Fear, Lack of Trust Turns Suburban, City Dwellers Backs on One Another

Trust will turn my hometown around.

It will. Trust me.

It will also diminish the fear that is paralyzing and immobilizing people from visiting, living or encountering Detroit these past few decades.

Fear of the foreign, unfamiliar and unknown prevents people of the suburbs from encountering and experiencing City dwellers.

I grew up in Motown, the city I love to this day.

Crossing the divide of city boundaries will fill the gap and bridge 'burbs and Detroit, and more.

Until action is taken to cross Eight Mile Road, for example, the mistrust and fear will prevent progress in Detroit and its financial and ethical crisis ruining it today. A similar saga presents and awaits itself to play out in the suburbs who have similar issues of fractured families, drugs, crime and a lack of faith in the home.

Faith will chase the fear and ever so slowly begin to replace fear with hope and promise again where trust turns hearts toward one another.

Turned backs will be replaced by faces looking each other in the eyes and engaging decency and faith once more in a broken town.

What can be done?

Concretely, one can befriend a family or household in Detroit or the suburbs. Places of worship and their leaders can facilitate face to face encounters. They can.

Exit fear.

Enter trust over time.

Fix Detroit with faith. Money is not enough to solve Motown's woes.

Goodwill is not enough, a reporter complained, when leaders met to address the ruin of Detroit
Monday in Roseville, MI.

The divide keeps people afraid and locked into their own turf.

The answer rests in the founder of the Catholic Worker, a movement this most influential and significant figure in the history of American Catholicism, founded in 1933.

Day noted:

"Love is the measure, but to truly love each other, we must first know each other, and to know each other, we must first listen to each other, and to listen to each other, we must first slow down enough to simply be with each other. But our society and our systems don't want us to slow down. Our society and systems want us to speed up in order to increase economic growth and wealth. Yet the true prophets of our age reject this way, and embrace instead slowing down, to be with each other, to listen to each other, to know each other and to love each other because, as we know, love is the measure."

It is.

No amount of money will save Detroit.

People will. Trust and fearlessness will turn hearts toward each other once more.

Faith, for sure, can no longer be dismissed as the answer.

It will fix the problem, remove fear, and bridge the deep divide between Detroit and the suburbs.