Unlivable Times

The other night I saw the premiere screening of the latest film in Chris Ivey's East of Liberty Series, "In Unlivable Times." It was pretty raw, and the filmmaker says that he will still be doing some serious editing (which is needed), but it still worked well. It focuses mostly on the voices of some very young people from the poorest parts of black neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh, commenting on the gentrification of East Liberty, which the real estate developers have taken to calling "East Side."

Despite a lot of forcefully-stated frustration and resentment from the people interviewed, most of it spot-on and very well-informed, I do have to note that it registers the sad decline in popular consciousness over the last thirty to forty years. One interviewee standing in front of the Shadow Lounge laments that a nearby building, which stood vacant for years, is now going to be yuppie lofts; this is fine as far as it goes, but he says that there is enough money in the neighborhood that someone could have done something with it to make affordable housing for people in the area (from the context, it is clear that he is referring to local drug dealers).

This sort of pie-in-the-sky dream of "self-reliance" is now not just the first thing, but the only thing that a lot of people reach for. The sad fact is that it is impractical. Once again, "self-reliance" is not a bad thing in and of itself, and locally-oriented small businesses, integrated with the community, can be a fine element of a healthy community and a step toward liberation. But forty years ago, it would not have taken a politically ideological person to point out what no one pointed out in this movie. Plenty of ordinary people would have been saying "The government needs to do something." As in, we have a lot of run-down places in this neighborhood and a lot of problems to solve, and a lot of out-of-work people who can be put to work solving them and on fixing things up; we should not have to wait for "investment" from the banks or real estate developers who will only remake things in their own image and make it unaffordable for the people who currently live here to stay; instead the government owes us, and should invest in this community to directly create jobs and put people to work at a living wage, rebuilding the infrastructure and solving many of the problems we have. It is not that most people are opposed to this demand, it is that it does not even cross their minds. This is what 30 years of Reaganism have wrought, and it is our greatest obstacle for the future.