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Converted from paper version of the Broad Ripple Gazette (v04n09)
Tammy's Take - By Tammy Leiber
posted: May 04, 2007

Tammy's Take header

In my last column, I wrote about an upcoming alley cleanup. With a few minor glitches (like squirrels eating the pizza), it went well.
The best part, as always, was talking to neighbors I hadn't seen since last Fall and meeting new ones. After we salvaged what we could of the pizza, a few of us sat on my front porch and enjoyed a refreshing adult beverage or two after a hard day of work. Everyone but me had lived in the neighborhood somewhere between 35 years and 50 years, so the afternoon turned into a local history lesson for me.
It was a small group, and we drifted in and out of each other's conversations. I mostly sat and listened, and smiled thinking about how I could almost be sitting on the front porch back home.
Someone ran to their house and came back with a picture of an IPS sixth-grade class, the composite photo showing all the kids.
"What was her name? She was cute."
"She's big as a house now."
Or, "My brother used to go out with that girl in high school."
"Oh, she's got four kids now."
Then my neighbors started talking about their friends and their siblings' friends, who dated whom and what happened to the old crowd from the neighborhood. Too often, the stories ended with drugs, or jail, or untimely death. So-and-so became a firefighter and moved to California, a few others stayed out of trouble, but too many of the stories ended with tragedy.
"When he got that manager job, I told him to quit dealing, but he didn't listen."
"He was such a smart kid, so polite, and then he got mixed up with the wrong people."
I sat there trying to imagine what it would be like if the kids I knew growing up were now gone, either dead or lost to some other world. Sure, accidents have taken a couple of them, and some kids grew up to be ne'er-do-wells, but by and large when I visit back home I still see the same people I grew up with and they're not all that much different, just older.
One of the things I love about my neighborhood is how familiar it is. When I moved into my house, it didn't bother me that most of my neighbors have a different skin color than I do, because they are the same people I knew growing up-plumbers, electricians, factory workers, bookkeepers, bus drivers, school teachers. They may not be rich in worldly possessions, but they work hard for everything they have. These are my people.
I'm a relative newcomer to Indianapolis, so I don't completely understand the history of what happened that turned neighborhoods like mine into battlefields. What I see is that a lot of good kids from solid families got caught up in it.
Many of those families are still here, raising their children and their children's children, living every day with the pain of a lost child or brother or sister or parent who got involved in something they shouldn't have. Where I grew up, making bad decisions as a teen-ager meant getting grounded for missing curfew, or getting suspended from school for getting in a fistfight, or spending a few hours in the county jail for underage drinking.
I realized, sitting on my front porch, that for too many kids, making bad decisions (as kids are wont to do, as I know I certainly did) is fatal. That's the real tragedy, for them and for their families, when good neighborhoods go bad.
By most accounts, our part of the city is better off than it was 15 or even 10 years ago. Property values are rising, violent crime is declining, and families are moving back. But there's still plenty of room for improvement.
When a young man was shot and killed at 38th and College a few weeks ago, I guessed, as did many other people, I'm sure, that he was involved in drugs or crime. However, the facts seem to indicate that the young man, Pierre Brown, was merely unlucky-he angered a motorist who followed him and shot him. Brown worked full-time and had a young son. Even if he did make a bad decision behind the wheel, he certainly didn't deserve to pay such a high price for it.
What most troubles me is that I don't know what the answer is. I understand the value of crime watch groups, of keeping an eye out for your neighbors, of preventative programs helping kids make smart decisions. But what I don't get, especially after that afternoon on the front porch, is what makes the consequences of bad decisions so much worse in some places than others, and how to correct it.



Tammy Lieber is a freelance writer who lives in Meridian Kessler, otherwise known as SoBro. A former reporter at the Indianapolis Business Journal, she now writes journalism and marketing pieces when she's not fixing up her house or enjoying the company of friends over a pint of Guinness. Her favorite spectator sport is politics, except on Sundays during football season. Email her at tammy@broadripplegazette.com




tammy@broadripplegazette.com
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