T-693: The Detroit Virus

The reason we are going to cycle across America has nothing to do with needing to get out of Detroit.  On the contrary, we want more and more to stay.  Our friend Craig describes Detroit has having "dysfunctional charisma".  That is certainly true.  Is there a place that has more immanence, in which the future is more present?  Or that the past has more painfully marked?

 We moved here in 1989, one of the first to catch the Detroit virus.  We fell in love with it, with its potential, with its stark and beautiful contradictions.  Since then, we have transmitted it to a number of people.  They come to work at Matrix, or with Detroit Summer, or with the Mercy Volunteer Corps, or some organization working at street level.  They find what we did: that is possible---nay required---to do really important work here that makes a real difference in people's lives and the shape of the city.  Also, that is possible to find a whole bunch of people doing similar transformative work.  Care a lot about food?  You can be at the center of movement building a new food system tomorrow. 


Detroit is the first rural city and that is part of its charm.

Want to shape the way different ethnicities work together?  Come and do the work tomorrow.  Do you want to live in such a way that culture and cultural expression is imbedded in daily life.  That's the way we roll in the D.  Once you get a taste for it,  once it gets under your skin, you will find yourself staying or wanting to return over and over. 

Want to break away from mindless consumerism, me-firstism, and deadening conformism?  Come on down.  There's hardly a store where you can spend your money.   You won't long survive without social capital in this environment where being connected and having relationships is the truer form of currency.   And to what will you conform  in this wilding ecosystem?  There is no monoculture, just the bumptious biodiversity of a vibrant ecosystem.

None of this freedom is free, of course.  This is the city of do-it-yourself.  And that means policing your own neighborhoods,  organizing your own recycling, creating your own recreation leagues,  cleaning and mowing your own streets.    You will pay taxes and wonder what you get for your investment.

You'll have daily contact with people this culture serves not at all.  Everybody here is just trying to make a way out of no way and some of the choices are terrible.  There is no doubt that Detroit will give you a daily dose of ugliness to go along with its freedom and social vibrancy.

I don't think you ever recover from the Detroit virus.  Every where else seems pale and innocuous and inhospitable by comparison.  We love/hate/need this place.  It is a power spot whose vibrations are both thrilling and exhausting.

No, we prepare to ride, not to run away from Detroit, but to run towards our selves and in so doing, run on a purer fuel when we return to the exasperating, endearing, delicious, delightful wreck of a city.