Here everybody has a neighbor. Everybody has a friend. Everybody has a reason to begin again. My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town. It’s a beautiful place to be born. It just wraps its arms around you, nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone . — Long Walk Home, Bruce Springsteen
By Bob Croce, EOP Publisher
Been thinking tonight about the struggle. Not when it comes to my life, which is pretty damn good these days, but when it comes to wanting to serve my neighbors, serve the community in which I grew up. For me, that goal is likely over, but while I sit here, thinking about the scars of political battles past, which tend to stay with you for a lifetime, I’m also thinking about a woman named Bukia Chalvire.
You see, these past two days she has become representative of that struggle. A struggle to serve in a city where good ole boy politics rule, and those who truly want to be public servants for all the right reasons, are ridiculed. In Peabody, if you don’t fall in line and kiss the posterior of those currently in power, the ruling class, the “cool kids” clique, you’re stuffed into a locker after homeroom and forgotten,
If you’re not willing to “go along to get along,” and don’t quite get the wink and nod of developers who grease palms with “envelopes” stuffed with Benjamins, then there’s no way you’re getting elected, and your family members can forget about that city job.
For our fair berg can indeed be a corrupt place, where people are afraid to speak up, and where the aggravation of running for office just isn’t worth it. Take it from me and my wonderful family and friends, who have waged hard-fought campaigns, only to many times face the wrath of political goons, who are connected to a corrupt power base.
This brings me back to Ms. Chalvire, a wife, a mom, a businesswoman who – after emigrating from Haiti in her 20s — has worked hard to support her family and realize the American Dream. All she wanted was to settle down in a nice all-American community, in a nice little home, on a nice little street with friendly neighbors and kids and dogs. And once doing so, she wanted to give back to this place by running for Ward 4 city councilor.
What she got instead the past 24 hours was a smack in the face from the establishment, which thinks elective office is all about self-service rather than public service. Maybe it was political inexperience, but she left herself open to a smear, an attack, a gross display of political sleaziness by the powers that be. She dared do what every other candidate and elected official has done for years on political literature and on Facebook campaign pages: She posted a picture of herself and her family with the city’s most-powerful elected official, who willingly smiled in the direction of an iPhone. Big hairy deal.
But the sleazy establishment insiders used it against her, smeared her in the local newspaper, and with self-righteous indignation, made this very good woman, who only wanted to serve our community, look like a scoundrel.
It’s a common tale here in our fair berg, a storyline of which I’m very familiar.
The hope at this point is that enough very good people will go to the polls on Tuesday in Ward 4, understand all of this, know what really happened, and make the bad guys pay for the horrible way they treated someone who only wanted to do the right thing. It’s called public service. Not self-service, Mr. Mayor.
Here’s hoping that Ward 4 comes out to vote in record numbers for Bukia Chalvire.
