Every day after Oscar, my 9-year-old boy, finishes his homework he puts on a rubber glove and goes outside with me who, carrying a little plastic baggie walks behind him as he picks up all of the trash that has collected in a day along the side of the house facing the street. The end of the house is about one house down from a corner store. This corner store, (which seems to be like most i have seen in the area/country) is run by a middle-eastern family and largely frequented by gentlemen who sell drugs and gentlemen who drink alcohol frequently. Often times, individuals will bear both of the descriptions listed above simultaneously.

In between our house and the store is a group of men that varies in number from day to day, but is comprised of certain core members who, 'run the block'. Often times to get to the house one must walk through the large crowd who will generally ignore if not politely step out of the way for you, (and by 'you', i mean me, because who i am is entirely connected to what i do and their awareness of it and if one of you were to walk through the same crowd right now i could not guarantee you the same results.)

Anyway, in the midst of all this is Oscar with his glove and i with my bag, gingerly removing the remnants of last night on the block. What we find scattered in the front gardens can provide some insight into what the neighborhood is made up of, like a social biopsy revealing secrets about the life it came from. In an average day our bag will surely have at least one flask or can whose leftover contents slosh around in the plastic grocery bag with cigarette butts, miniature zip lock bags used to dispense crack-cocaine, fast-food wrappers, church fliers, candy and candy wrappers from the school children and occasionally the odd item such as a cereal box or canister of raisins, half-eaten. On the days that, for whatever reason, Oscar cannot be there, i end up with the privilege of wearing the glove as well and have found a few treasures including a bullet shell that appeared to belong to some kind of small handgun and some intact bags of coke or heroin or something that must have been abandoned in a moment of panic or disorientation. I found something poetic about the bullet cast into the garden, a bullet being like a seed of death that can stop a family tree from growing. I saw the drugs as seeds of struggle in a society so desperate that they will peddle poisons to their own community in an attempt to rise out of it. I thought of the music that blares on every corner, glorifying both of these evils, cultivating death and struggle in youths who should be given a chance to grow and live. Ghetto is an image now, an image that i believe is meant to give power to the people it addresses. But what i see is that the ghetto is crying and terrified. The ghetto is full of mothers who want better for their children and fathers who hate themselves because they can't provide it. Its full of little girls who look for love in the wrong places and end up pregnant with babies that they can't love because they have never known love. Its full of those babies, all-grown up and devoid of Love, wondering why life seems like such a struggle. And so in conclusion to this, i ask if 'ghetto' has become fashionable, in whose image is it fashioned?

With such realities as global warming and nuclear threat, talk of the end times is on the rise. People mutter about the apocalypse and speak of the return of Christ. What did Christ bring to the world? Love. That would be a revolution. We live in an age where we watch our own human family, just across the bridge from us, starving and struggling while we casually pass them by in comfortable indifference. By our own fears we deny a better world. Its the world of a child, where everyone is a potential friend and disputes can be overcome with laughter and forgiveness. Far surpassing the Levite in the story of the good Samaritan, we pass by our own countrymen and women on the road each day and insist we have 'something more important to do'. I believe that Jesus is a' comin' back. I also believe that he comes back a little more each time you dare to Love instead of fear people.