Dear Studs Terkel,

Do you think that there are controversial matters such as lack of communication within a neighborhood due to its "ugliness" or is it just a matter of people being very unsocial and keeping to themselves?  In your book "Division Street America", you quoted, "My goal is to survive the day.  To survive it with a semblance of grace, curiosity, and a sense that [you've] done something pretty good.  [You] can't survive the day unless everyone else survives it too.  [You] live in a community and if it isn't in good shape, neither are [You]".  Maybe it is not so much of the color of skin that pushes us away from other individuals, but the quality of character one expresses when communicated with.  To survive by the pleasure of others positive effects and outcomes every day, defeats the nature of building character and responsibility to a certain extant.  One can not fully develop character if one does not find its affects to be useful.  For example, in society, colored people are known to hold the highest rate in crime.  If a random African American man approaches a non-colored individual, such individual would lack interest in conversation; as if the AFrican American were to be wearing a suit and tie, a conversation might then be worthwhile.  Because of this, I believe that if one lives in such a lifestyle(surviving only if society does), a major part of their day and life would eventually lose its' meaning.  Not in a sense that one should lose their life over another ones bad decision-making, but by striving for a goal that [you] have no control over.  The greatness about Chicago is its multiculturalism;therefore, to help better the community, one would have to start with one individual group and work their way up from there.  Because of its variety in religion, belief and conduct, it is merely impossible to try and shape the human mind into pertaining only positive attributes, allowing men and women of different cultures to simply get along and support each other without any thought about their own separate beliefs.  So what I am really trying to say is why such the worry about a community's outcome if the people(heart of a community), tend not to care about it themselves?  Why be intimidated by life if one learns to live within it? Sometimes it takes a "cause" to open the eyes of the helpless because one will eventually get tired of living that way.

                                                                          Sincerely,

                                                                                     Marlon Tello