Kansas City: Let's use this moment to come together, at last

I see from the newspaper this morning--again--that there will be additional police out in town tonight, most specifically on the Plaza.

The Mayor announced yesterday that he'll be walking around down there. (Thanks for the warning, Mayor).

Then there's this: "A group of African-American community leaders, led by Alvin Brooks, who is a police commissioner, held a news conference Friday to announce they will be present tonighton the Plaza to make sure any youth gathering remains peaceful and safe."

Thank you, once again, Mr. Brooks.

More: "Brooks, who is president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, was joined by ministers, Kansas City school board president Airick Leonard West and others. They said they wanted to have a good dialogue with any youths who gathered."

This, then, is how a great deal of good can and, of course should, come out of this whole "Plaza melee'" mess from the last few weeks.

Can we not, now, learn something from all this?

Can we not, now, come together as a city and as one group of people who live here and work together, as one, to better this city?

We could.

We should.

We can.

We should use this as a catalyst to stop being East Side/inner city/West Side/suburbanite, etc., and, again, come together as one city and work to solve our problems.

And right now, we have the attention of the Mayor and his office, the "establishment", represented by Highwoods Properties (the Plaza owners and managers), all the retail store owners and managers down there, the leaders of the African-American community, virtually everyone.

We all have a stake, certainly, in seeing to it that no one group terrorizes or intimidates another, anywhere in the city, at any time.

It's not who we are.

It's not how good cities work, of course.

And we all have a larger stake, too, in having our problems addressed by all of us, for the good of all.

Alvin Brooks or Mayor Funkhouser or Airick West or somebody needs to say as much, in a very public way, while the television cameras are rolling and the media has their attention.

Let's get at this, people.