We were invited to Jordan New Life Community Church this morning. It’s on 25th and Logan, the neighborhood where there are supposed to be gun shots and drug deals day and night. It was tranquil this morning, the service uplifting, and the building air conditioned. The congregation was multiracial, with many young people from the suburbs on a mission to show their support.

Rev. La Andriamihaja

We spoke to the pastor outside. He knows problems in the neighborhood are deep and intractable, but he wants to start by building bridges with people who should be allies. For instance, Rev. La Andriamihaja is frustrated by the tension and animosity between African-Americans and African immigrants. He’s working with the Council of Churchs an two-way cultural education that would build up both communities.

Adrian Kemp

Adrian Kemp is a parishioner and another community leader. An executive with a telecommunications company downtown, he chooses to stay in the neighborhood and confront directly anything he sees as threatening behavior. He speaks with contempt of sound-bite politicians who show up only for TV cameras. He knows the problems are systemic and acts on his belief that they can’t be solved unless two populations get more hope and more leadership; young people and their fathers, many of whom are incarcerated. So he takes it upon himself to go to schools and prisons and talk to people about how to be proud and aware of the pitfalls of street life. He says poor women are heroic if they can get their African-American sons educated, keep them out of prison and off drugs. He says his mother is a hero.

Then we hit I-94 and drove to Rogers. Was it ever sleepy on the holiday weekend. Lucky for us the antique stores downtown were open, and the women with booths there were in a mood to talk. Kathy Zegar raised her family in Hanover, along this corridor that’s become the definition of urban sprawl. She’s feels the old lifestyle slipping away and wonders if the traffic jams and pace of development will ever let up. The schools and the social infrastructure arent keeping up, and she says she would pay more taxes if that would help. But she hates the new stadium tax and thinks a lot of the new development deals are good for business and bad for people. She’s fed up with politicians.

Kathy Zegar

Across from the railroad tracks, Jeanine Allen was also open for business on the holiday weekend, but we didn’t see any customers at her garden center, and she had plenty of time to talk to us. High gas prices have hurt her and other small businesses, she says. She’s interested in putting wind farms in Rogers, more teachers in schools, building up personal retirement accounts, exploring single-payer solutions to the health insurance crisis and…running for state representative. She says she has voted for Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Greens, but now that her children are grown, she feels obliged to act on her ideas through the political process.

Jeanine Allen