Anderson, South Carolina
For forty years it’s been my great joy to travel the world, collecting images out of time; ancient cathedrals, castle ruins, remnants of Roman temples, Mayan pyramids, the laminated tells of long-forgotten civilizations. There’s perverse pleasure to be had in cataloging the detritus of lost worlds. An admixture of curiosity, wonderment, bewilderment, even great sadness and lament washes over me. One cannot but experience melancholy when viewing the likes of Hiroshima at ground zero. What a waste, literally and figuratively.
Psychologists have long recognized the ability of humans to compartmentalize their minds, to safely store toxic experience and memories in hidden recesses of the psyche. Victor Frankl gained fame for his development of logo therapy, articulating methods for coping with life in Nazi death camps in his compelling Man’s Search for Meaning. Zbigniew Drecki’s graphic and stunning Freedom and Justice: Spring from the Ashes of Auschwitz provides a vivid portray of his coping skills in man-made hell. I’ve coped with intensely toxic environments in my own particular way, especially when it comes to cataloging evidence of natural disaster and man’s incivility to mankind.
When getting off a jet in Miami after a journey to Haiti’s Port Au Prince, it’s easy to safely upload intense sensory images into archival storage and move on with my happy life. I have the separation, the compartmentalization of five hours of airtime between my affluent American dream and Haitian reality. While grappling with horrific images of Hitler’s holocaust when walking along the Arnhem River, I know I can tuck tail and flee for twelve hours by jet to the cozy safety of my suburban American trance. There’s no shortage of cognitive dissonance for me when deplaning after long-distance travel to dangerous places on the State Department’s top-ten ‘avoid’ list. Yet, somehow the dissonance dampens and I get on with the happy illusions of my life. Time and distance heal my discomfiture.
Viewing battlefields is not so bad when one has the separation of five centuries from Cromwell’s mayhem or five thousand miles and six decades from Hitler’s havoc. A combination of time and distance provides an illusion of safety. What does one do when neither time nor distance is sufficient to maintain a mirage of safety, when the ruins of civilization are walking distance from one’s nice suburban house?
Recently I was given links to videos cataloging the destruction and loss of Highland Park, Michigan. It once had the highest per-capita income in America; was the fastest growing city in the world, and boasted the highest-rated public schools in North America. Highland Park and nearby Detroit are being held up to the world as haunting icons of the death of a way of life. Now described as the world’s largest ghetto, it’s inconceivable an alloy of greed, violence, drug addiction, and economic and political misconduct of the highest order could render such an astonishingly bleak landscape of cannibalized dreams, looking like Hiroshima’s ground zero in 1945. Only this time there’s no combination of time and distance to dampen my angst. It’s entirely too close to home.
For some days I’ve had a hard time letting go of images of our American heartland, a place where new public policy includes simply running a battalion of bulldozers across cities, burying them, and withdrawing public services, because public coffers have been bled dry. We learned too well from Haiti’s experience under Papa Doc and his son, Baby Doc, who just returned to the Haitian tragedy.
I suggested to the one sending me these links Detroit’s experience is anything but unique. Just ask refugees from New Orleans, South Florida, or Camden, New Jersey, if they know anything about the death of cities. The one challenging my assertion told me his city of nearly 500,000 does not have a single abandoned building. Refuting his claim, I suggested even my little town of 28,000 has a huge inventory of abandoned buildings and burn outs. For two days I went out with cameras to document this all-too-close reality.
Within walking distance of my suburban house I cataloged an astonishing array of ruins, everything from abandoned department stores, rail lines, malls, textile mills, hardware stores, mill houses, even nice suburban houses. In a three-mile span I cataloged approximately two and a half million square feet of residential, commercial, and industrial property under roof now abandoned, burned out, or offered for sale for decades. Two miles further out is another 1.5 million square feet under roof in two dozen buildings. At one time these hundreds of buildings on perhaps a thousand acres employed twenty thousand people. They now provide sporadic shelter for homeless addicts.
Astonishingly, many of the most haunting ruins, open to the weather for decades, are in immediate proximity to downtown. I wonder how it is we spend $100 for an upscale dinner only three hundred feet from ruins of a way of life unknown to the present generation. In aureate sunlight of late afternoon I photographed terra cotta ruins from another lifetime, wondering why I don’t experience the same enchantment that comes with photographing Sicilian castles, why instead a low-grade anxiety laps at the edges of consciousness. Perhaps there’s not enough time and distance to create a mirage of safety.
In the evening while photographing the delightful interior of an intimate restaurant, I could not but wonder about the kinds of table service available to addicts living in moldy cellars of the abandoned department store across the street, to single mothers and infants living in frigid cellars of the roofless hardware store a block away, to the guy living on the abandoned rail platform below me. The images of terra cotta ruins were too fresh. Three hundred feet and two hours just don’t give enough separation for my impressionable brain which prefers denial. I wonder how it is our town was named an All-America City. I wonder who gets to participate in egalitarian images of the good life.
Moody Metrics Analytics, a research group, routinely conducts audits of the fiscal health of states and municipalities. Recent surveys revealed twenty-two municipalities across the country at special risk for financial default. My city made this ignominious list. Our one remaining public swimming pool was scheduled to be closed last month, a victim of poor public policy and planning. Perhaps it can be used as a landfill for the terra cotta ruins of downtown if we can ever afford to take them down.
The Old Testament writings of Nehemiah have long been held up as an example of transformation and renewal possible from the vision and dedication of a single man. While Nehemiah was in Susa, he heard the people in Jerusalem were in great distress, the walls collapsed, and the gates burned with fire. He sat down, wept and mourned for his city, fasting and praying for days. In his prayers he confessed, “We have acted very corruptly against thee and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes.” Nehemiah petitioned the Lord to remember His promise to the people, “If you return to me and keep My commandments and do them, though those of you who have been scattered were in the most remote part of the heavens, I will gather them from there and will bring them to the place where I have chosen to cause My name to dwell.”
Nehemiah had the extraordinary courage to ask his king for permission to return to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem; even asking for access to the King’s forest. Nehemiah’s account is given to describing the victory that comes from returning to God, seeking His guidance, and trusting him during challenges and conflict. Jerusalem was restored. For twenty-five centuries his account has served as an inspiring example of what is possible when even one individual seeks God to perform the impossible.
One wonders what might be very different for American cities facing abandonment, and fiscal and social crisis. What would be possible for Detroit, Camden, New Orleans, even Anderson, if a battalion of visionaries plowed forward in prayer rather than bulldozers?
If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Perhaps one day, as in Nehemiah’s day, it can be said people gathered and offered great sacrifices and rejoiced because God had given them great joy and restored their cities.
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