Disney offers model to reshape our cities

A news article regarding the more than $100 million in grants slated to help Detroit stated that even that staggering amount is not enough. One official stated the need “to be creative and look at existing programs.”

We Americans are very creative people. An animated mouse, a hamburger stand, a dime store, and a duck call inspired dreams that built empires. We are dreamers; we are planners; we are doers. Unemployment, a sluggish economy, a city on the brink of bankruptcy — we can fix them all.

Plan A: Doing everything to revitalize our impacted towns (in other words, Detroit). Disney’s unfinished dream community is our model. We ask men and women of proven experience in leadership, planning, construction, logistics and every other conceivable skill — including our military veterans — to take charge of the project. They need jobs and we need people who can get the job done. Other jobs come from the retail and business needs of the new community; and more jobs, as Disney envisioned, from the local and regional needs of major corporations who would invest in the “city of tomorrow.”

Money for the project? To start, we 316 million Americans, in a show of support for our plan, donate $1 each. In full support of our support, Congress authorizes foreign aid redirected to our plan. Many countries need our help, but we cannot give them what we will not have if we do not help ourselves now. Aid resumes upon completion of Plans B through Z.

Disney said “If you can dream it, you can do it.” This plan sounds radical, but somewhere between radical and practical, something can be done. We Americans put men on the moon. This is only Detroit.

Judy Resele

Mount Prospect