Ernest Hemingway used to live in Oak Park. Oak Park is a suburb of Chicago that is now considered by many people as a warm, welcoming community. This is what Hemingway said of Oak Park, “Oak Park is a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds.” When I first heard this, I remember some ire coming from Oak Parkers about how Ernest Hemingway could say such a thing. It isn’t the nicest quote, and it puts anybody who wants to be proud of Hemingway living there in a bit of a problematic position.
Percy Julian also lived in Oak Park. He is a famous chemist and the second African American scientist inducted in the National Academy of Sciences. When people heard that Percy Julian was moving in to Oak Park, some Oak Parkers decided that they should fire bomb his house. Percy Julian and his family still moved in, but he had to camp out in his tree with a shotgun to protect his home. Hemingway’s quote goes from being a kind of rude thing to say about a nice community, to a quote that maybe actually underplayed his feelings about certain people.
Oak Park today is a fantastic town, but it is important to remember that it wasn’t always this way. It is an important lesson to learn, especially now that it is easy to find evidence that things aren’t exactly the best they have been. It begs the question whether things are just bad before they get good, or maybe that in order for things to get better, we have to acknowledge that things are bad in the first place.
So what I guess I am saying is that before you say why something is good or bad, maybe the more important answer (or in some cases, the only answer that matters) is why it is the way it is. I find that this is always the more beneficial and enlightening thing to learn.
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