Fri 24 October 2008
Obama in Gary, part III
This year, Gary’s city budget has faced a $13 million shortfall, a number that could more than double in 2009.
She said Obama has gone out of his way to make Gary feel as if it is relevant again.
The Indiana NAACP held its summer youth summit in Lake County, and Davis said she could see tremendous enthusiasm among the Indiana youth for the Democratic candidate.
“We want to be able to start engaging the youth to continue beyond November,” Davis said. “We want them in January and March to say that education is still an issue.”
Shernette Sanders, a freshman at West Side High School, said her classmates talk about Obama and the election almost every day. Still four years away from voting, she makes phone calls for the campaign.
“I feel like I can help,” Shernette said. “I can make a difference to help other people to vote for Barack Obama because I think he’ll make a good president.”
While not taking away the need for continued affirmative action, Davis believes Obama has, indeed, elevated the bar in the minds of the black youth she works with.
“I don’t want an African-American male youth to say, ‘I want to be president,’” she said. “I want them to ask, ‘How did he get to those goals? How did he stay faithful?… I can go to college; I can one day be a lawyer. I can one day marry a strong African-American woman who is articulate.
“Like me,” she said, with a laugh.
MAYOR RUDY
“Right now the federal government is building schools in Iraq and tearing them down in America,” said Rudy Clay, the charismatic if not sometimes bombastic mayor of Gary.
He gained notoriety nationally on the primary night, when, while feuding with the Hillary-supporting mayor of neighboring Hammond, he was accused of delaying the release of the vote totals until very late, hoping to push Obama over the top in dramatic fashion.
In the end, Obama fell a little less than 2 percentage points short of Hillary’s tally.
Clay believes Obama would be more likely to increase Housing and Urban Development funds for Gary, as well as beef up the COPS program that would help put more police on the streets without having to rely only on local revenue.
“We want the same things every other community wants — a better standard of living for our citizens,” Clay said.
As far as Gary’s problems, he said the city was like “an octopus” — cut off one arm, take care of one problem, and another one pops up.
Regina Cossey said she did not support Clay when he was elected in 2006, but now that he’s in office, the whole community should give him a chance and work together with him to make Gary a better place.
“There is absolutely no doubt that this town should have as much enthusiasm about this community as a presidential campaign,” Cossey said. “We can’t expect the mayor to do it all, the people of the city need the commitment, too.”
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
“I like what Obama says, change comes from the bottom, up, not the top, down,” Cossey said.
Perhaps everyone in Gary has their own perspective on what the most pressing problem of the day is.
Alinsky advised his community organizers in Chicago or elsewhere to listen to everyone’s disparate issues and find a way to link them together, the power being in the organization.
Obama, at Altgeld, used Alinsky tactics to get the CHA to remove hazardous asbestos. Like Rudy Clay’s octopus metaphor, though, he found the aging pipes in the building were in disrepair, and money wasn’t available to fix both problems.
Still, with the loss of the asbestos, the Altgeld Gardens housing project was better off than when he started.
With the same spirit, Regina Cossey works on in Gary.
“I think there are many things we can do that don’t take too much,” she said. “When you talk about crime, if you’ve got a good neighborhood watch team, you can make an impact.”
If a lawn on a neighbor’s vacant or foreclosed house is not getting mowed, mow it for the good of the neighborhood, she said. Stabilize the neighborhood, stabilize the city. If a neighborhood bands together, looks attractive, it may just attract business and jobs, and little by little, Gary could turn a corner, Cossey believes.
“There used to be strong neighborhoods in this community. That isn’t true anymore. The neighborhoods aren’t strong like they used to be. I saw (Gary) go from a booming, viable place to a place that’s not what it should be — not what it can be.”
Barack Obama began his political career as a community organizer for change. Looking for help to get elected in Gary, he just might inspire the city to help get itself the change it needs.
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