Think Green

The Green Melting Pot Being Green in the ‘80s was about recycling your soda cans for little league uniforms. Composting was feeding our rat population and energy efficiency was the remote control and buying the latest Ronco Piel appliance which allowed us to “Set it and Forget it” so we could turn our attention to Mike Tyson’s latest knockout and Michael Jackson’s newest album. We swept crack vials and pipes off the baseball fields before playing games and made extra dollars reselling hub caps and tires to anyone with a flat tire. Green was in its infancy, but it was making waves in Brooklyn. We said “no” to PCBs. We started recycling programs and food co-ops, our dirty neighborhoods became our concern. We started planting trees and cleaning our sidewalks and talking to our neighbors about clean yards. Our many languages and attitudes somehow connected to the environment. We saw the future and it had Green written all over it, only we had been doing the writing in Graffiti and now we had to clean that up too. Cultural Diversity grew out of this melting pot of ideas, images, music and colors that made up the Hip Hop Nation we were creating. We were establishing our positions, building alliances, forming support groups and creating a new army of thoughtful protesters to the past transgressions. In many ways, our growth in social and economic improvement was largely about embracing our differences, finding solutions together and speaking up about the things that mattered to us. Today, Brooklyn is a center of economic development. Those wild frontier days of cultural revolution have lead to a hot bed of revitalized neighborhoods, local business growth, steady tourism and a music mecca of studios, lounges, clubs and bars where people gather to discuss the next big thing in cultural relevance. Brooklyn defines in many ways how America has grown up.