Detroit Industry.

My mom had minor surgery this past week, so today I did my duty as a loving son and called to check up. Disregarding the call as business-as-usual, she asked if I’d gotten a chance to read Mitch Albom’s feature from the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. She spoke on the article with a tone that made me feel it was my duty to read it.

“It’s about Detroit,” she said, as if nothing worthwhile had ever been written about the city where she was born and raised. She told me how the piece been reissued to the front page of The Freep as well, knowing I don’t read much more than a computer screen these days. “I’ll save it for you.”

“Detroiters Carry On Amid All The Hardships”

From the title alone I knew it was going to be much more than a sports story or some rehashed, Lions, year-end resentment. Mitch knows better than that. What it ended up being was one of the best pieces of literature I’ve ever read.

And yet Detroit was once a vibrant place, the fourth-largest city in the country, and it lives in the hope that those days, against all logic, it will somehow return. We are downtrodden, perhaps, but the most downtrodden optimists you will ever meet. We cling to our ways, no matter how provincial they seem on the coasts. We get excited about the auto show. We celebrate Sweetest Day. We eat Coney dogs all year, and we cruise classic cars down Woodward Avenue every August, and we bake paczki doughnuts the week before Lent. We don’t talk about whether Detroit will be fixed but when Detroit will be fixed.

And maybe you ask why? Maybe you ask, as I get asked all the time, “Why do you stay there? Why don’t you leave?”

Maybe because we like it here. Maybe because this is what we know: snow and concrete underfoot, hard hats, soul music, lakes, hockey sticks. Maybe because we don’t see just the burned-out houses; we also see the Fox Theatre, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Whitney restaurant, the riverfront that looks out to Canada. Maybe because we still have seniors who call the auto giant “Ford’s,” like a shop that’s owned by a real human being. Maybe because some of us subscribe to Pastor Covington’s words, “We are somebody because God loves us, no matter how cold the night or hard the mattress.”

I’m proud to say that Albom speaks for all 10,000,000-plus Michiganders like myself who call Detroit ourcity, despite its problems… no matter which side of 8 Mile we live on. In response to the slew of ‘It’s So Cold In The D’-type pieces from writers and columnists who have no first-hand account of how bitter it can be here, Albom conceptualizes an economy of Leatherman and broken souls who carry on despite the year-round blizzard. He lets the criticizers who use the city as a punchline, many of you included, know that it’s not okay to belittle us.

We know exactly where we stand, and it’s the fact that we’re still standing that makes us great.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to stop by my mom’s again and tell her how much I appreciated her lead on this article. It’s all I’ve been thinking about since I first read it. And since she’s the type of person who likes to hip me to things she feels are important, her bruised soul could do well with knowing she passed something this powerful onto me.

No matter what your views are, or what misconceptions may or may not be true, read this article with an open mind. Read this not only as one of the key pieces of work by the best newspaper columnist in America, but also as a glance into the duct-taped mindset it takes to rep ‘The D.’ Read this like it’s your own hometown that gets squashed on the regular by the media giants of the world. Read it like that, because, unfortunately, one day it could be.

Classic.

Detroiters Carry On Amid All The Hardships [Freep]

Stray Shots

Black_Milk-Broken_Wax_The_EP

Black_Milk-Give_The_Drummer_Sum_Bw_The_Matrix_(Digi_12)-WEB-2008

Guilty_Simpson_Ft._Saen_Paul_and_Black_Milk-Run-Promo_CDS-2008

Bump J – Word On the Street

Dre_Dog-The_New_Jim_Jones-Retail-1993

Bizzy_Bone-Heavenz_Movie

Zion_I-Street_Legend-EP

Xzibit-_Restless

VA-Talib_Kweli_Presents-Blacksmith_The_Movement

G-Unit-Terminate_On_Site (Bonus Tracks)

The Game-LAX (Bonus Tracks)

Ice Cube-Raw_Footage (Bonus Tracks)

Jake One-White_Van_Music (Bonus Tracks)

Jamie Foxx-Intuition (Bonus Tracks)

DJ_Khaled-We_Global (Bonus Tracks)

Kidz In The Hall-The_In_Crowd (Bonus Tracks)

Lil’ Wayne-Tha_Carter_III (Bonus Tracks)

LL Cool J-Exit_13 (Bonus Tracks)

Stray Shots