Born Into Ruin: How the Young are Changing Cleveland

picpiiparinen.jpg

It’s true. I am not happy all the time living in Cleveland. But I don’t want to be happy all the time. That’s unnatural. Said Nietzsche:

“Sometimes, struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were to go through our life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been.”

Cleveland is a struggle. But that is how I know it. That is how many Clevelanders in their 20’s to 40’s know it. We didn’t know the city of Mr. Jingeling and Bob Hope—the city of a near million—the “Best Location in Nation”. No, we knew Cleveland on its knees. We knew Cleveland praying. But being born into post-industry is a good first lesson. Life is an obstacle. Cleveland prepares you.

For what?

Bullshit, or at least the proclivity of it.

Aspirations abound now. If you were only creative enough, rich enough, worldly and knowledgeable enough, then: you can become something, a star—evolved from your basic beginnings. Fine. But it’s this ambition-before-all-else mindset that has also extended our eyes from our feet, or our aspirations from our selves, and so for long the country has left its principles behind to build castles in the air with no foundation. Consequently, our culture—our sense of being from somewhere, of bleeding the aesthetic of someplace—has taken a hit. It’s no surprise, then, that our castles keep falling down into a pile of broken promises that never seem to be able to feed, clothe, or employ us properly.

To hell with it. Time to be proud in the gift of being grounded. It is the only way up.

Grounded. It’s how we are grown here in the Rust Belt. For you see it everywhere: the reality of things. You see it in the cracked sidewalks, and in the seriousness on the faces of the people all around you. You see it in the empty brownfields behind chain link fences. Yet there is a comfort in the Rust Belt aesthetic, one tied to the fact there’s little pretentiously precious. From the bodies we are built with to the handshakes we make to the food we eat to the buildings we see, shit is heavy here. And it’s a ritual you learn simply by living on Rust Belt ground.

I am watching this unfold first hand with my 2-year old daughter. You see, I have a place near the rail ties, and each time the train rides through my girl runs to the window to see the power of the “choo choo”. I watch her with a smile as she watches with awe as the force of the box cars enter our bodies through the vibrations coming up from the ground. She is becoming Rust Belt, I think. I do this every time this happens.

But this groundedness, this Rust Belt-ness, it’s not a settling or a lack of aspiration, but rather—for Clevelanders populating the city that never knew its heights— a chance to look around and see nothing but work to do, and an opportunity to do it. There are a lot of fresh eyes around. The city psychology is changing. And I think this may save Cleveland, because people are no longer waiting for Cleveland to save us.

This is happening all across the Rust Belt. For instance, Detroit native Bill Morris recently wrote about his trip back to Motown to “see that Detroiters had stopped waiting for salvation from above – a new auto factory, a new government program, a new housing development – because they were too busy saving themselves down at street level.”

Morris goes on to interview Jack Kushigan, a Detroiter who grew up working in the family’s machine shop before moving to San Francisco and then back. He writes of Kushigan:

I met him in the woodworking shop he’d set up in a church basement on the city’s hard-hit East Side, where he was teaching neighborhood people how to make furniture out of wood harvested from abandoned buildings, a virtually limitless source of raw materials. “Detroit for years, during its decline, has been hoping for a Messiah,” Kushigian told me. “Detroit has finally given up on that. A lot of people in Detroit have a fire burning inside them that I don’t see anywhere else. My feeling is that the Messiah is us.”

I feel the same thing is happening in Cleveland. The work the young people are doing. The fact they are entering the broken dreams of past generations with no illusions, little skeletons, but with a determination that comes with being grounded. And it is this kind of collective turn-the-page energy that will end the endless recent history of our decline.

Call it the benefit of struggle, or of not having your castles yet crumble because you’d been born into the ruin.

This piece originally appeared on Cool Cleveland.

Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.



















Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Youth is indeed much needed

Youth is indeed much needed energy. There are many activities you can do while you are still very much power. You are very lucky.
http://www.palmabrava.com/

العاب بنات

They are still young indeed have to find a way out of all the problems that exist. However, unfortunately, the parents sometimes do not want to help العاب بنات

Being young will be a very

Being young will be a very difficult thing. There are many challenges to be able to do well. There are many challenges in front. العاب بنات مكياج

The young people must be

The young people must be able to act swiftly and intelligently. There are so many problems waiting to be solved by them. http://www.shooting.org/Dealers/California/MAR_VISTA/WILD_TUNA_GUN_WORKS

Children born today must of

Children born today must of course be able to overcome the many challenges it faces in the future. They must be smart and intelligent. Autel MaxiDAS DS708

They are still young indeed

They are still young indeed have to find a way out of all the problems that exist. However, unfortunately, the parents sometimes do not want to help. lexus rims

the young entrepreneurs

The comments about Cleveland can also be said, in part, about New Orleans, although I think the press over does it.

Even some of the old guard, whose perspective was looking back and keeping the status quo, changed somewhat with Katrina.

Like many cities, the white working and middle class is gone, but here are probably 2000 newcomers who seem to be making a difference in the city's long term rejuvenation. New Orleans will never be Houston but it is slowly getting better.

Not cool is

bad grammar

Clevelanders in their 20’s to 40’s
Clevelanders in their 20s to 40s

Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024