No A.I. here

None of the intelligence found in Dorchester is artificial. It's all 100%, unadulterated and natural, just as the good Lord intended it to be. You've got to be quick witted and quick on your feet to make your mark in Dorchester. If not, you'll meet your maker none the worse for wear. In Dorchester the cream rises to the top, but its a fatty, slurry soup that is both shaken and stirred. There's no easy way to get noticed but, as usual, half the battle is won just by showing up.

This isn't to say that Dorchester, Mass. is full of the halt, the dumb, the slow-witted, the marginal, the lackluster, or the lamebrained. Dorchester is full of bright minds that are unpolished, diamonds in the rough. What else would any sociologist expect from the rough-and-tumble school of hard knocks from which Dorchesterites graduate? There is an eloquence to silence and great writers know that the best sentences are composed with the fewest syllables.

Men and women of few and pungent words, the men and women of Dorchester, Mass., say what they mean and they mean what they say. Their insights are incisive. Their observations cut to the chase, through sinew and gristle down to the bone of a matter. Their soliloquies are dismissed by thesaurus-laden, ivory tower effetes as the grumbling of an unwashed, disgruntled mob, but if actions speak louder than words then Dorchester is home to most eloquent class of Bostonians. Leave similies and citations at the border.

From Carson Beach to the filled-in South Bay, from Harbor Point to far up the mouth of the Neponset River, along much of the length of Blue Hill Avenue, in parks, on dead end streets, in cul-de-sacs, on thoroughfares that are major to their neighbors but minor to the greater city's sense of itself, Dorchester plays out philosophical conundrums to justified and satisfactory conclusions. Life is lived in the round and in the raw in Dorchester. There is nothing artificial in people making their way in a world they only partly created.

If you live in Dorchester, you make the best of it. It's easy if you try. You needn't be the sharpest knife in the drawer or the sharpest tool in the shed. You just need to apply your edge where it will be most effective. Dorchester has a genius it can call its own. There is a Dot-madness afoot between Southhampton Street and River Road, between Morrissey Boulevard and Blue Hill Avenue. Boston's future history will be written in the words spoken by today's citizens of Dorchester, people who have been tempered in an urban crucible that often neglected in the present. A specter is haunting Boston. It is the specter of Dorchester.