Yesterday, while eating a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, I thought back to a Turkey Day potluck a few years ago at which there were so many dishes that I had to form two distinct layers of food on my plate in order to sample everything. Today I wake up to read that a few Walmart stores are (once again) conducting food drives for their own employees. Down in Missouri, there’s anger and grief and shouting and violence and prayer and hot-air-blowing because yet another black man was killed by casual bigotry. And the temperatures in Detroit have sunk below freezing while Motown’s blanket-wrapped homeless sleep under colored Christmas lights on Woodward Avenue.

There’s a lot of juxtaposition here, but I want to talk about that Thanksgiving plate…or, more specifically, I want to talk about layers. Most everything is layered—stories, problems, history, thoughts, memories, onions, ogres. Surfaces are polished or scuffed. Cores are ghastly, sweet, dark, complex, or absurd. Sometimes all anyone wants to do is dig through the layers as quickly as possible, to find the takeaway or see what’s really going on. Sometimes the varnish can be so deceptive that very few notice there are layers at all. Sometimes folks see more layers than really makes sense.

In the Walmart story, the top layer is most likely Walmart employees don’t make enough money to feed themselves or something along those lines. Scratch a bit of that off and you’ll get into the territory of what kinds of people work at Walmart and why, how can the Waltons make so much and pay so little, what has the superstore economy done to wealth disparity, and plenty more. In Ferguson there’s a flawed justice system, a series of bad decisions, what kinds of people become police officers, is it reasonable to be fundamentally scared of black men, and so on until online commentators have covered and re-covered it all.

Here in Detroit there are more layers (and more complicated layers) than I’ve seen anywhere else in my lifetime. There’s blight across the street from Boston-Edison. There’s an economy that’s still built on basically one industry. There’s government mismanagement and corruption. There’s a history of racism that still controls the movements and behaviors of nearly everyone in the Metro area. There’s a new boom of young and cool and often white people like me. Under all of these topcoats that you can see in pretty much any corner of the city there are depths and layers: capitalism is a big one, as are migration, segregation, industry, middle class, white guilt, gentrification, big dreams, bad dreams, and the human condition.

To heal, (re)develop, build, change, adapt, alter, or otherwise make an impact on anyone, anywhere, or anything, it’s usually a good idea to dig through a few layers. Don’t love or hate the M-1 rail project without understanding who’s building it, where it’s going and why, who it’s meant to serve, and what events and motivations led to its conception. Don’t pass judgment on the mural downtown that says “GRAFFITI SAVED DETROIT” unless you take the time to find out some more about graffiti, the act of saving, and Detroit. Don’t think that everyone who lives in (insert area here) is (insert adjective here) until you understand everything that makes those people and that place whole. And don’t try to fix something that’s broken by working on the top layer only—that’s quite a bit like trying to heal a gunshot wound with gauze.