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April 16, 2006

Hope

Nick Coleman writes about Easter on Rice Street.

Rice Street, for non-Saint Paulites, is a toilet; from University Avenue all the way up to the border with Roseville, Rice Street is a morass of skeezy bars and junkyards and blight - a little piece of Minneapolis in a part of Saint Paul that has defied the city's generally good trends, home both to nihilistic gang-bangery and blue-collar white moronism (a couple of beating deaths of black guys at biker bars over the years punctuate the endless stories of drug killings, violence, and general awfulness).

Coleman writes about a group of Lutherans who are going to demonstrate this morning on the street:

That's Easter for you: Resurrection for a street corner, or a city, or the human heart. Or maybe nothing. If we don't believe it could happen, why bother?...You don't have to be anything at all, religiously speaking, to appreciate the courage of that.

"We have come to expect violence and death," Pastor Tjornehoj says. "But despair is not the last word. That's the great Easter surprise: 'He is risen.' This is a powerful day. As people of faith, we sing and dance on a grave. We come for a funeral, but we will find the tomb is empty.

True. Christ came to save us, and redeemed us by his rising.

But Rice Street? Doesn't it just seem so...hopeless?

And so, this Easter, a band of bagpipe-playing Lutherans will risk appearing naïve to celebrate the victory of their Lord in one of the places where hope is a rare commodity.
Only if you constrict your focus to asymptote.

Because hope is all over the place, if you look.

Rice has, reportedly, always been a tough street. And since Urban Renewal and the driving of I-94 through the traditionally black Rondo neighborhood gutted the central core of Saint Paul, it's only gotten worse.

But right around the corner, on University Avenue, is all kinds of hope. Refugees from genocidal hellholes in Southeast Asia have taken over most of University, from Rice up to Lexington. They've done a great job of revitalizing what was, twenty years ago, a blighted morass. People fled genocide, torture, shallow graves and a life of slavery for...what?

Hope. Just around the corner from Nick Coleman's colony of misery.

Turn left at University, again at Lafayette, and again on Payne. Hmong and Eritreans fled revenge, chemical weapons, and politically-driven starvation, to flee to...Swede Hollow and Dayton's Bluff. To hope.

Rice Street, in the shadow of the Capitol, is a monument to the the limits of Minnesota's "Better Life through Better Government" philosophy that obtained here from the forties through the nineties.

And University, around the corner, is a reminder of hope - not in welfare checks and entitlements and programs, but in the hope in what American really offers.

It doesn't take a baloney detector to see Rice Street needs to be cleaned up; it's one of Saint Paul's most miserable main drags.

But don't let it blind you to the fact that hope is all over the place.

Posted by Mitch at April 16, 2006 07:05 AM | TrackBack
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