Household, streets and alleys redone in phase 2, 3 & 4 of Walker grid +4 plan

Wireless broadband Internet access

by Kevin J.  Walker

Greg Brundage, former MCJ and Weekend staff writer actually broke the story of how Milwaukee was one of the first cities to have an extensive underground network of fiber optic cables.

They were gradually threaded downtown especially when the court mandated multibillion Deep Tunnel Sewerage project was built, since the streets were being torn up anyway. [The orange initials "F.O." are to show work crews where the optic fibers are when digging].

There was not yet a publicly available Internet per se; the parent ArpaNet from the Defense Department’s Advanced Projects office was still the clannish province of researchers, university geeks, and the foreign scientists and stateside professors and contractors of the Military Industrial Complex who built it during the cold war as an amorphous Doomsday communications network that would survive even if America was destroyed.

Since the Wisconsin entrepreneur hadn’t yet developed the graphical user interface web browser known as Netscape that allowed people to navigate the young Internet with pictures and clicking with a mouse, it hadn’t exploded into the wild popularity it has now.

Yet, in Milwaukee the infrastructure was built and still remains. Some downtown institutions such as the network of government offices--Job Service in the state office building was a big user--the library, and Marquette University made use of it with their powerful high capacity T1 lines to link their components and share servers and files between departments across the street or the city.

What this means is that Milwaukee can run junctions from the cables to homes or neighborhood clusters, or make local area networks or LANs of fast Wireless Broadband access to the Internet based on the new WiFi 802.11n protocols.

That’s TechnoSpeak for saying you could log onto the Internet and cruise Cyberspace with no wires from the comfort of your home, with speeds fast enough to allow you to watch movie quality downloads.

This would allow households to engage in online classes, health tutorials, surveys, English As A Second Language, entrepreneurial pursuits, or Freelance working from home for data and word processing for various corporations and so forth. Youngsters in families can have a whole new world open to them as they communicate online with peers in other nations (in addition to doing their schoolwork of course) with the resources of a vast Cyberspace.

When I ran the Safe and Sound Power Up! After school computer lab at Northcott Neighborhood Center at 6th and Wright one of my young charges looked ... inquisitive, and creative.

"I want to talk to somebody in Canada. A boy" she said, as casually as saying she was going to the store to buy some candy.

She was just trying to decide what portion of the large nation to the north she wanted to plumb for an online pen pal: the populous urban but French speaking East, or the more rural Northwestern provinces? She was only 11-years-old but she already had a global sense of her possibilities.

It’s good that our children are even faced with such choices.

They should know that there is a whole world that is well beyond the boundaries of 6th and Wright, and that they can have it, too.

There goes the neighborhood: will the last middle class family please turn out the lights?

It has been remarked upon that in the past, areas where Black people lived had all the social classes together. People saw decency, diligence, and duty, and as in the old childhood story of the Lazy Grasshopper and the Busy Ants, and could contrast it with those who didn’t have it and note their decline, thereby providing a moral compass by which to guide their lives.

With the coming of the economic and residential opportunities of Integration and the family automobile, the Black Middle Class had no reason to hang around compressed with other lower classes, and flew away like bats out a hole in Hell, never to return.

So as living conditions in the cities worsen, we see African Americans moving further and further out to outlying suburban and the new Exurban areas. (A lot more would be moving out if not for residency restrictions on public sector employees).

In fact, so many have fled that there are Black churches and newly established suburban and Exurban chapters of the NAACP, such as in Ozaukee county.

The ones who are left behind in the Culture of Poverty are inheriting a city that is growing increasingly more crime-ridden, noisy, and dangerous.

In the spring and summer months when people are supposed to be looking forward to opening up their windows and enjoying the outdoors, many Middle Class renters--and homeowners especially--are cursing each rising degree of the thermometer.

It means the windows of cars, homes of others also will now be opened, and the Sounds of Summer will be heard all across the land: Loud, sometimes obscene Rap music from "Boom Cars" that you can actually feel before you can hear them as they cruise the streets or park near your house rattling your windows; the cursing and conflict from combined families crowded on top of each other when one is evicted or a single mother has to flee with her children in the dead of night from an abusive relationship; TVs and stereos with volume turned up bone-jarringly loud so the inhabitants can hear all through the house--or outside, while they barbecue or talk curbside with their homiez and homiettes, whose own cars may be booming their tunes nonstop.

Anyone seeking a break from normal everyday stress or students seeking a quiet zone would be hard pressed to find an oasis in their neighborhoods under such circumstances.

You can take people out of the country, but...

Milwaukee as other cities saw a post WWII upsurge of Southern migrants, and the continuing impact of those new citizens have had an effect to this day.

Northern cities saw the phenomenon following the Great Migration after World War II out of the South.

For the South and Southeast, the migration often was from the rural areas to the cities, and sometimes then, to other Northern states. No matter, the examples still hold for the rural to the urban environs.

"Country" ways have long been remarked upon and made a topic of humour and derision. But there are good reasons for their ways, but when transported from the agricultural areas to the compact and populated cities these ways caused friction and prevented assimilation.

When combined with the Culture of Poverty in which many of the emigres found themselves these ways not only became markers for them but prevented their elevation into the ranks of the Middle Class, homeowning and educated, upwardly mobile population.

The front lawns of their homes are bereft of grass because of their Southern ways as well. Grass is allowed to be stomped out of existence from the children playing in front of the house because in the rural South, this is how they kept poisonous snakes from slithering in and getting too close and under the homes, (which were often supported on stands because of the high, wet water tables so they don’t have basements) and so the serpents wouldn’t get into the house.

Now they just keep on doing it by habit even though the original reasons are lost.

There is also a disdain for Nature overall by many in the COP; a reaction to the hated rural profusion of flora in the piney country sides of the Southland and a liking for the sterile modern city of concrete, including plastic coverings on furniture to be taken off only for company and special occasions.

This is among the reasons why some inner city homes have the front lawns pulled up and cemented over--sometimes even painted green or outfitted with artificial turf for patios.

Even large, stately trees nearly a century old are cut down though they don’t threaten the house and it detracts thousands from the resale value of the property, as well as causing higher energy use by overheating by the unshielded sun in the summer.

Hanging wash on fences like they were still out in the countryside--even on busy streets with bus lines--is another country characteristic that was passed along, like residual Southern accents and speech patterns for those who may never have visited the South for much longer than a family reunion, but everyone around them still retains the long ago and far away speech patterns so they talk the same.

Why talk and play music so loud?

The loud music and "Loud Talking" is because of their rural heritage. Loud talking is a country lifestyle holdover because coming from a farming environment, in their work outdoors they had to make themselves heard over far distances. In cities close-in it is now out of place and such "loud talking" indoors is frowned upon.

There was even a book on the mannerisms titled "Why Do Black People Talk So Loud?" which we featured on the local PBS affiliate "Black Nouveau" TV program, in 1990.

There is an aural, or sound-oriented Personal Space that goes along with the concept of physical personal space, in which we don’t expect the sound of others to intrude upon our consciousness without discomfort, or considered rude on the part of others.

Cruising crises a warning

During the warm weather period, hundreds of "young people" (many are really Chronological Adults in their twenties), would drive their cars through residential areas late into the night in the perennial problem of young people, among whose deepest desires is to be around each other in profusion.

Since the parks are off-limits after constricted hours even in the longest days of the summer, and there are fewer nearby drive-in theatres, they cruise the streets or park in service stations and congregate.

With few official or legally sanctioned gathering spots, or even an understood wink-wink, "hands off, we don’t see it unless it’s serious crime" zone, the Young People (including teenagers and early Twenty-Somethings) have taken their carousing to residential neighborhoods.

There have been reports of young girls having sex on the hoods of automobiles, with hordes of people gathering to watch the festivities, taking a seat on the private property of whatever unfortunate neighborhood has been selected in their roving mass party.

They camcord themselves or use digital equipped cell phones, trading their own homegrown ‘Girls Gone Wild" videos.

They even use technology to arrange their own "Flash Mobs" sending text alerts as to where the gathering is going to be that night. Lakefront? Westside?

Anybody wanting to see in a microcosm of the future class struggles involving those in the Black Middle Class and the next generation of the Culture of Poverty need look no further than what is happening during the Cruising Crisis, which also shows the quality of the next generation of misleadership.

Next: Paying ourselves first, community self-sufficiency; financial literacy, and supporting Black-owned and operated businesses instead of sending children of other races to college and to the Upper Class.
kevin j. walker email: walkerworld_2000@yahoo.com; website: http://thewordnetpaper.tripod.com.