Under the Overpass

I waited at a stop light in a rust-belt town last week, squinting into the hazy sun and staring thoughtlessly at the overpass ahead.

To my unconscious mind, it must have looked like any other riveted steel tunnel in America; I didn't notice the details.

Looking through the bug-spattered windshield, a freight train began passing overhead - which was interesting enough for a picture, which I deftly took and e-mailed to myself.

Only after I saw the digital version of the setting could I see it with a different perspective.

We've been conditioned to associate "urban" with grungy and cool; active and exciting.  Bars, restaurants, night life.  Starbucks and night classes. Transportation.  Ethnicity, diversity.

Urbanites ignore panhandlers and street cons.  They don't see the traffic or pollution or construction; all are necessary evils.  The sounds of ambulances and police cruisers are just a frenetic background, although mostly unheard, to the excitement of city life.

The urbanophile will preach the benefits of living in the foreground - of fostered individuality within a shared and diverse society.  There, in the foreground, you can become John Travolta swinging paint cans and hips on a city street to the music of Stayin' Alive.  You can become self-actualized by teaching in city schools, walking a police beat, or by working at a methadone clinic (one was right across the street from my hotel this week).

But behind that veneer of trendiness and ideology, there is a decay.  A decay of sagging and naked wires strung low between tilted poles. Of vestigial, forgotten construction projects marked by fading orange cones and potholes.

And there are parades of billboards that showcase vast moral and social erosion.  Stopping racial crime, hiring an accident lawyer, fixing a credit score, or testing baby DNA to get the daddy to pay up.

And other signs.  For sale signs.  Empty storefronts. Abandoned homes, lines for shelters.

We need better places to live better lives.  Places where people can see not just the promise of the future, but the goodness of today.

We have too many weeds, too much rust, and sadly, too much resignation and acceptance.  The half-dead infrastructure is as despairing as the new generation of the homeless and the masses of the unemployed .

Will the next stimulus, with it's new wave of shovel-ready projects, begin the renewal?

Can the urban psyche even be repaired?  Or, will the next immigration movement come not from Mexico or Europe, but from the eroding towns in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois to places of hope in Texas and Florida?

Or, there's another option - and it requires no money and no commitment: stand under a decaying overpass in a cloud of diesel fumes and lead paint.

And act like it's glamorous to be today's urban yuppy.