In success, I will not stray…..

You don’t have to look  far to see successful people “stray”.   Tiger Woods, Kwame Kilpatrick, Don Hill, Rod Blagojevich and the list goes on and on.  It’s not hard to identify moral and ethical failures of others, but today’s excerpt from the St. Philip’s Creed goes deeper than that.

In today’s society success has become  synonymous with separation.  The more successful we become the further we remove ourselves  from those that could benefit from the residual effects  of our success.   We become successful (in this context  success equals earning more money)   and immediately seek better neighborhoods, better schools, better places to go to church, better places to shop etc.   In seeking this “better” way of life we nullify the impact we could have politically, economically and socially on the communities where the need is greatest.  The communities that we once called home.  In other words in success we stray.

It isn’t a crime to desire life  in a safe, clean neighborhood with high performing schools and a Starbucks on every corner, but if we are truly concerned about the community at large we have to find ways  to reverse the “flight” trend.  The solutions are not simple.  “Successful” people are drawn to planned developments and good schools like moths to a flame,  but how do you develop neighborhoods that exist in areas overcome with  poverty, poor schools and crime?   Is it even possible?

Gentrification is the strategy used most often, but displacing people is not a strategy I’m particularly fond of.  I would like to suggest that we start with improving the public schools.  The common denominator for thriving neighborhoods and communities are high performing schools.   Maybe if we dumped more money into science and math and less into athletics we could begin to see  an improvement in the quality of our public schools and student performance.  What if for one year the DISD suspended all of it’s  spending on athletics and allocated that money for teacher raises, computers, textbooks, science labs, etc.   What would the results be?   I know that sounds extreme but wouldn’t the payoff be worth it?

Ignoring  problems won’t make them go away.  Eventually they will find us.  We have to do something.  In our success we cannot continue to stray  from our communities, our churches and our schools.