She’ll walk past this billboard everyday. Telling her she’s worthless. That she made the wrong decision
Call her LaShonda. She’s 21. Everyday she travels to her downtown retail job from her small apartment near the 5800 block of South State Street in Chicago where they will put this billboard. The bus and the el trains are always crowded. On some days it’s an hour trip each way. She makes $8.00 per hour.
There’s a junkyard on the block where they’ll put this billboard. Bare trees on a hardscrabble city street in a neighborhood where 40% of the people are under 25. Most of the people living in the area are children, age four to nine. Most of the 41,000 people who live in the area have an income of under $10,000 per year.
LaShonda had the abortion when she was 19. She went alone. And when she came home, walking past the lot where the billboard will be, she was alone. She turned on the TV, put the water on for some tea, her retail job is in a tea store, and sat down in her chair. No one heard her cry.
The billboard is scheduled to go up in the next few weeks. After being taken down in New York City, Chicago now gets to see these billboards. 30 of them. Just like the one LaShonda will walk by every day.
The political wars go on. The attack on Planned Parenthood. The lobbying for government control of life’s most intimate decisions. The twisted use of the President’s image.
While a shoulder slumping, vacant eyed young woman will soon walk past a billboard twice a day that reminds her that she’s worthless. That she made the wrong decision.
She doesn’t think too much about the baby. The one that might have been. At least that’s what she’d say if you asked.
And she doesn’t think much about the future.
Sometimes on the el train when she can get a seat, she’ll take out her pencil and start to draw. Forests and mountains and pencil grey sun filled skies of hope. She can see the color in her grey sketches. If there was anyone to tell her–here—take this paintbrush–perhaps she could change the world with her art.
She makes stories with her sketches. She has something in her mind that makes her reverse the letters when she reads. So she doesn’t read much. But she loves to hear the stories. And she loves to sketch. Most of them she just throws away when the train gets downtown. No place to keep them while she works.
So there will be no sketches in her hands when she walks past the billboard.
Maybe in awhile, she’ll forget the billboard is even there.
As if there was a way her eyes could become even more empty and cold.
On a bitter cold street with a billboard looking down on her.
A young woman with her head down. Trying to get home.