Two sides of Detroit worth reading
In recent days I’ve run across two brilliantly written essays on the plight of Detroit - one dark and brooding and one bright and uplifting (with a little darkness, too).
Both are long, but also worth the time it takes to read them. They give you a depressingly real view of how bad things are in our state’s main city. But while one starts and ends with how awful it is, the other manages to make you laugh and give you a little hope.
Matt Labash, in a piece written for The Weekly Standard, follows an interesting cast of down-and-out Detroiters around for awhile, telling their stories.
Mitch Albom, of Detroit Free Press fame, took a similar approach but turned it around and made you proud to be a Detroiter, or at least a resident of a nearby Michigan city.
I don’t like everything Mitch Albom does, but I liked this piece. It shows some of the stubborn courage that makes Detroit, well, Detroit.
Together, the two essays give you a feeling for how bad it is, and how that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Hello Dan ~
I am glad I ventured over to News Notes as it was interesting to read Matt Labash’s essay on Detroit and compare/contrast it to Mitch Albom’s essay on the same subject.
I am with you in that I don’t always like Mitch Albom’s columns/work, but his essay in Sports Illustrated and re-run in The Detroit Free Press was well done.
I read, I believe in The Detroit News, that a Cincinnati reporter’s take on Albom’s story was a way of looking for people not from or living in the Detroit area to feel bad for the people who are living through these times.
As the reporter from The Detroit News indicated and you wrote in this post, Albom is simply pointing things out as the currently stand ( along with related history) and yet how the people of this city/area have that something in them that allows them to continue foward with determination, grit and hope.