We Are Atlantic City

Speech from recent Teach-In at Stockton College, 11/6/14:

As I began to prepare for my 15 minutes today at the podium, I was put in mind of the great American writer and storyteller Studs Terkel, who focused on working class people struggling to make it through.  In his book Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression, he writes: ““What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.”

So I would like to begin by saying that I have spent a 17 year career trying to understand violence.  I work full time as the Coordinator for Community Initiatives at The Women’s Center, a local nonprofit that is focused on ending power based personal violence that happens between people, as well as preventing violence that occurs in communities.  I have come to understand intimately that in fact poverty can create desperation.  

You may be asking why?  Why does poverty create desperation?  I’m not sure I can answer that, but I can say this: I have worked with many women who have struggled with poverty, who have struggled to access the most basic resources, have struggled with the time that is sucked away by social service agencies and public assistance agencies and the constant presentation of hoops that they are required to jump through in order to get their most basic needs met.  Desperation does not come when a family is having breakfast for dinner for the third night in a row because all they have left in the refrigerator is cheese and eggs.  Desperation does not come when a mother has to leave two hours early to take public transportation to a job that is a half hour away by car.  Desperation may not even come when a parent has to take off from a job where they make minimum wage and yet still qualifies for food stamps, in order to attend an appointment that demonstrates that they are still eligible for those services -- and this happens every six months.  Desperation comes from the slow, slow pain of all these million small cuts, all these small gashes that gradually bleed an individual to death. Desperation comes from the grind of living daily with poverty, sometimes in the shadow of significant affluence.

Does desperation automatically create violence?  No, not automatically.  But I can say, in my experience in working with individuals who have believed that violence is a problem solving tool, it is typically a desperate move.  The use of violence doesn’t come as a last resort, a tool that is used after every other tool has been explored and used and found wanting -- too often we live in a world where violence is the first option, the immediate option.  Why?  Is it because that is one of the first lessons we learn, in our households and in our communities?  We solve problems first and foremost through violence?  If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, as the great psychologist Abraham Maslow said.

By this point, you may be asking yourself, What does this have to do with Atlantic City?  Hold on, I’m getting there.  The message I really came here to say today is that we are Atlantic City, and it is time for us to consider picking up a different tool.  Whether you live in Atlantic City, work in it, or just visit it occasionally for shopping or nightlife -- we are Atlantic City.  The entire financial economy of Atlantic County is tied to Atlantic City.  Our housing markets, the quality of our schools, our small businesses -- their lifebeats begins with Atlantic City.  The human capital that we have in Atlantic County and even to some degree this college, is because our economies -- our financial economy, our social economy, our human ecology -- is connected to Atlantic City.  We, and Atlantic City, are at a crossroads -- do we want to travel down a path of poverty, desperation and potentially violence -- or are we ready to consider what other wrenches and screwdrivers and awls we have at hand.

Atlantic City is in a transition and has been invited, once again, to reinvent itself.  My question to you is this -- if we are Atlantic City, if you are Atlantic City -- what will you contribute to the redefining and reinvention of Atlantic City?  What will you bring as an asset -- what talent, expertise, what energy will you contribute to Atlantic City?  What tool do you have?  If not you, then who?  If not now, then when?  

Too often communities in transition witness the public and social risk without realizing the public and social profits.  In Atlantic City, most of the profits have been private profits, while desperate people and communities have carried the risk.  I ask you now to consider HOW COULD THIS BE DIFFERENT? -- Do you have one innovative piece of the new tool, the new hammer that Atlantic City will use to rebuild itself?  I ask you to consider how Atlantic City can be stronger together than apart.  What relationships need to be established with and between the people who are invested in Atlantic City, so that this transition can result in working smarter, not harder?  What connections need to be made between the various boards, organizations, grassroot movements and stakeholders who care not just a little, but a lot about Atlantic City?  How can these entities be empowered and engaged in such a way that many voices are heard, that many solutions are proposed, that there is a rising tide of people so invested in positive outcomes for Atlantic City that this tide can’t be chastened and AC emerges stronger?

Most importantly, what do you bring to the table?  Are you looking to go into the computer science field?  What app can you write that helps to give voice to those desperate to envision a different AC?  Are you in health sciences?  How can you begin a conversation about community health, and the fact that it starts not with flu vaccines and outreach programs, but with infrastructure and access to nutrition and affordable and safe spaces?  Are you in sociology, or anthropology or education or social work?  You are the potential feet on the ground that can work to make Atlantic City stronger together than apart.  

By taking action, by becoming involved, by being part of the solution, you are automatically resisting the urge to become part of the problem.  By saying “NO!” to poverty, you are saying “NO!” to desperation.  By saying “NO!” to desperation, you are saying “NO!” to violence.  Whenever you say “NO!” to something, you are saying “YES!” to something else.  What are you saying “YES!” to on behalf of Atlantic City?  This is something only you can decide.

Thank you.