Community and Understanding

Marion Orr’s talk on the problems facing education in Baltimore goes hand in hand with Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” because they all emphasize connectedness, or a lack thereof, among a group. “In a Station of the Metro” is a poem about the anonymity of people who are physically very close to each other. “Everyday Use” talks about the connectedness of a mother and her daughter while it shows the falling apart that occurs when people do not stick together and continue to talk and relate to each other. Marion Orr emphasized the importance of community groups in the city to mobilize families to fight urban problems. These three works emphasize the connectedness and locality of certain people and warn of the dangers of losing contact. They support the claim that contact and emphasis of local strengths are very important to relationships.
Marion Orr spoke about Baltimore’s problems with education in the city. He outlined a bleak state of affairs for the education system. Baltimore, he said, lost a great deal of its tax base during a massive exodus of wealthy people to Baltimore County in previous decades. He said that, at the same time, poorer black families moved to the city in droves. The tax base was eroded even more as manufacturing jobs in Baltimore were sent elsewhere. Orr said that Baltimore had lost much of its say in state government because voter turnout in Baltimore was a paltry, almost negligible, percentage. He warned of the dangers of losing the city’s youth to the dangers of the urban culture and he proposed his own course of action to help bring about change in the city schools and the city’s neighborhoods. His solution consisted in tapping into the countless local community groups to work within each neighborhood or community to bring out strengths in each community and to provide activities to the youth of the city. His main idea was to bring neighborhoods together in these groups in order to bring out each community’s strengths through teamwork and interconnectedness. In this way, Orr said, the local relationships would grow stronger and become an important tool to fight against the problems facing youth in the city.
Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” is a picture of a city that is the opposite of Orr’s idea. While Orr wants interconnectedness and familiarity, Pound talks about a metro where faces simply appear in the crowd, somewhat anonymously. He uses the words “wet” and “black” (2) to add a tone of darkness and make the picture seem to be not ideal. While the crowd in the metro is physically close, like the neighborhoods from Orr’s talk, they do not have a personal relationship and do not know each other. Pound’s poem insinuates that they are all connected; they are one crowd and they are all leaves on one bough. However, that bough is black because its only connection is a physical one, there is no relationship, which would be ideal and, perhaps, add some color to the branch.
“Everyday Use”, by Alice Walker, shows a dichotomy between familiarity and estrangement. Mama and Maggie live together and are familiar with each other, their own culture, and their family life. Dee, on the other hand, has left the family, gone to college, married another man from somewhere else, and, after her education, believes that she knows the problems with black people’s culture and the solution to them. She tells Mama that Mama does not understand her own heritage when, in fact, it is Dee who does not understand her true heritage. She has been learning about her theoretical or historical heritage for so long and has been away from her own roots for so long that she has a distorted view of her family and its culture. She says that “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker, 931). She is referencing quilts that she wants to take to her home to admire as art, but she does not understand that they were made to be used by the family and appreciated as useful- something the poor probably have to do often. Like Orr, Walker seems to emphasize that familiarity and locality are important to understanding, while distancing and separation are not ideal.
These three works show that familiarity is important because it allows understanding and teamwork. They show that when people are separated personally they cannot support each other. However, when communities are brought together physically and in a relationship with each other, much more understanding and common good can come out.