Dot Confucius

"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." - Confucius.

The same can be said of a city.

As a magnet of opportunity, a great metropolis draws immigrants from all walks of life. It used to be that the wealthy as well as the poor lived cheek by jowl in our cities. This is still somewhat the case in Boston. While many of the wealthy have emigrated to the suburbs, Beacon Hill is still a fashionable address for the upper crust. Their are new, luxury condominiums high above the rest of the older city skyline around the waterfront and the Common. The same can't be said about the other neighborhoods though.

Roxbury Heights for instance, was once quite prosperous. You can tell by the architecture that remains. I drove through the neighborhood this afternoon and nowadays it is more ghost town than prosperous. Ashmont Hill isn't in such an abandoned state, but it has seen more glamorous days. Some of the streets are the most picturesque in Boston and, in fact, my favorite house in the city is located on Melville Avenue. Tell someone in Tory Row that you live in Ashmont and they'll say, "How can you? The Red Line smells like urine after Savin Hill!" Not true, the breeze off Dorchester Bay sprinkles the atmosphere with the aroma of April freshness. Even in August.

While no one should be begrudged having a little extra pocket change or a nest egg socked away for retirement, these things seem to be the exception rather than the norm in many parts of Dorchester. What does that say about Dorchester in particular and Boston as a whole? While extreme poverty may be negligible, so is extreme wealth in the Dot. To say the neighborhood is middle class is accurate and there is no shame in that. To say it is upper middle class is a stretch of the imagination even this daydream believer cannot swallow.

When a city is governed well, poverty, while not something to ashamed of per se, is symptomatic of a broken system. When a city is mismanaged, the means of achieving comfortable wealth are distasteful. The same is true of influence, reputation, and perquisites. What is the source of access? Character and ability, or connections and the ability to make 'donations'? Would you tell your mother how you earned them?

I'm no insider. The only time I've been inside City Hall was to get my Dorchester parking sticker, a plain slug of a design for motorcycles on which the clerk writes Dorchester and the expiration date with indelible magic marker (and not with the best penmanship, I might add). Is the city mismanaged? We have an experienced urban mechanic keeping the gears well-greased. I have little interaction with the local government aside from dodging or paying parking tickets and dealing with what seems to be an regular stream of excise tax bills.

I am not insinuating any corruption in the current administration. Plenty of innuendo surrounds it, but it just that: nothing proven and certainly nothing egregious. It could be an interesting election. Or it might not. As Tuesday's editorial below was entitled, The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.