EEMA gets a lot of calls to our helping hands hotline, many of which are from elderly residents in lower Bloomfield.
We help these folks with cleaning, weeding, lawn mowing, taking trash out, snow shoveling, carrying items, fixing small holes or leaks, rides to medical appointments, and more. We’re guests in people’s homes and lives, so naturally we end up having conversations.
I hear a lot of things I didn’t know about the history of the area from its long time inhabitants, some who’ve been here since the early 1950’s. People are gracious enough to reminisce about their childhoods and about the way things have changed.
I hear wistful laments to long closed social halls and gathering spots. They remember the businesses that no longer grace Liberty Ave and the friends who breathed life into those spaces. They smile when recounting as a kid chasing animals across Liberty; temporary escapees of an old slaughterhouse near the current Adrian’s Pizza.
Sometimes their views surprise me, as one woman expressed that “there’s nowhere to go in Bloomfield anymore.” Sometimes they add further confirmation to my existing views, as in the case of really sweet and decent dinner visit by Troy Polamalu to a Bloomfield family he met by chance.
Some express concerns about the changing nature of the area and the feared loss of the area’s Italian character.
Inevitably, following discussions of why our group is doing what we’re doing, the conversation will shift into resident’s previous interactions with younger people who’ve moved into the area.
It is almost always the same story: disappointment and misunderstanding.
One woman asked me why the college kids nearby run away when they see her, then recounted a depressing story of how the kids had promised to help with some things and never showed up. Apparently, now embarrassed, they avoid her the few times she ventures outside.
Another talks about the special snow shovel she had to buy due to health issues and how continual thefts of this and other supplies from her yard forced her to give up shoveling.
An elderly gentleman refers to the strange young people on bicycles as tourists. I eventually learn he didn’t realize many of them live in the community.
It is quite easy to live your life as a tourist in the East End. A person can partake in cheap diner food, hip bars, alternative show spaces, cool music shops, big house parties, and a variety of other social events. All the while you can be completely disconnected from the larger social fabric of the area, with little awareness of the lives of large sections of the community.
Such disconnection also means a general lack of awareness of where power in the community actually resides, an ignorance that can be deadly to anyone interested in social change. Often, the lack of connections means younger white progressives run to local CDC’s to give them “community” validity.
A college student can easily go about their day having no idea they are living right next to the person who called EEMA because they were literally out of food in their cupboards, or the woman who had no one else who would help her thread a needle to allow her to continue her favorite hobby of sewing.
We live in an alienating age, where most live far from immediate and extended family. There is increasingly less direct communication and conversation between people who do not already know each other.
Different age groups tend to spend their time differently and have particular activities they find interesting and important to them.
In general, not as many younger people are Catholic, attend church, play bingo, attend neighborhood blockwatch meetings, spend time at beauty salons, grab a drink during the day, etc.
Fewer elders are on Facebook and many don’t own a computer. The chances of developing a friendship with someone much older or younger than you seems fairly slim when you consider where you find most of your friends.
These differences may not matter much if your family is from the area and you grew up here, but it makes a real difference for others when you don’t have common spaces and activities that bring you into contact with people whose daily lives otherwise look very different than your own.
Still, I see signs of hope. There seem to be a lot of people who want to work on building healthy communities, who see the ills of the world and say it doesn’t have to be this way, we can change things.
But good intentions aren’t enough and we can’t better this world alone. Our work needs deep roots that connect people. Exploitative systems that concentrate power in the hands of the few feed on alienation and dislocation.
I know for myself part of addressing this question of creating the world I want to live in is rethinking how I live my life and asking questions about my own effectiveness.
And for those of us whose political beliefs (in my case anarchism) are widely misunderstood and often disparaged by the media, what hope do we have without widespread support within our own neighborhoods?
To win long term battles you need allies, and those relationships have to be based on mutual respect and understanding of difference.
Activism isn’t particularly useful or sustainable if it’s disconnected from the rest of your life. A once a week meeting is just another hobby.
My experiences these last couple years are that older generations aren’t looking for one-way charity. They sometimes need mutual aid with certain kinds of tasks, but so do younger people. Building more diverse political and social relationships creates a healthier base from which you can engage in struggle.
And it’s not charity when you’re getting so much in return. I’ve been personally humbled by the gifts that more regular (if still limited) contact with non-family elders has brought me in my political understandings and my personal life.
I’ve been reminded that it is possible and necessary to age with dignity. That there is value in an open ended cup of tea and that we give things up when we have such a reliance on technology to mediate our connections to other human beings.
I also see more clearly that addressing anti-social crime means building strong, healthy communities and interpersonal relationships, in addition to addressing systemic afflictions such as poverty. We need to acknowledge real and imagined fears in order to resist state justifications for repression.
I’ve also seen in practice how generic assumptions about people based on what we think about a word, be it Catholicism, anarchism, Islam, or Capitalism are dangerous because they avoid and destroy context. It’s useless to judge people you don’t understand, and you can’t really understand someone if you don’t take the time to get to know them; to learn the stories, experiences and ideas that led them to the words they use to quickly identity their political-cultural-spiritual views.
Without understanding you’ll end up dismissing some great people and sheltering some really horrible human beings. And no political movement has meaning if it doesn’t place a great emphasis on its adherents treating other people with kindness, dignity, mutual support, and respect.
I’ve also been reminded that, yes, I am going to die, as we all are. Our culture is very youth oriented and many avoid older people because they do not want to be reminded that they too will get older.
It’s unavoidable that those who comprise the older generation of Bloomfield residents will one day be gone, dead or moved. With their passing we will lose a lot of the unrecorded history, the stories of those who created so much, and helped usher the neighborhood through Pittsburgh’s dark days of deindustrialization.
And if younger people who’ve moved here don’t step up we’re going to miss out on rooting ourselves and passing on these legacies, as well as severely limiting our own potential for shaping this area’s future. It’s not too late.
