Let me tell you the story of a street.

It's a humble street, a city street, a pot-holed street, a street which is very nearly paved with illegally obtained Percocet, a street where Christmas finds the roofs of the houses carrying a light coat of heroin.

You will find frightened old people on the street. They moved in back when it was working class, before the factories went away. You will also find the permanently unemployed, the provably disabled, the faking it disabled, the welfare mothers and some gang members. The neighborhood speaks several languages. There is a Wal-Mart on the site once occupied by a huge upholstery factory that paid its workers about $15 an hour.

There's another abandoned factory that used to be a pigment and dye factory, and another one that housed a garment plant. The former pigment and dye place is empty. The former garment factory now hosts a store that sells discount candy and a store selling window frames and doors. There is a dollar store on the street and a cut-rate grocery store and a lot of houses, most of them multifamily. There's a liquor store, as there must be in all poor neighborhoods

Way up at the top of the street there's a single story, several building-ed housing project for the elderly, a grade school, a used car lot and a cemetery. It's the world in miniature, or at least the world of the poor in miniature.

It's the kind of street you come back to after a hitch in the military or a five-year bit in prison.

Due to the vagaries of urban non-planning in my hometown, the street has two names. Up at the top, it's called "Quarry Street," because there used to be a granite quarry on that end of the street. They filled that in when they built the project for the old people.

The poorer end of the street is called "Quequechan Street. The word "quequechan" is Native-American. It means "falling water." There was a small river here, which was paved over in the 19th century.

If you drive down Quarry Street, you go past the nicely kept old people's project, past some neatly sided houses and down to an intersection with a pizza place, a Chinese takeout joint and a convenience store. After the intersection, the neighborhood becomes increasingly seedy as it becomes Quequehan Street. The Wal-Mart is a bright blot of light, but there are purse snatchings in the parking lot all the time and the dope dealers linger on the cracked sidewalks, waiting for the cars from the suburbs to pull to the curb.

It's an American street, with every American malaise, from OxyContin to the stunned incomprehension of people who no longer have the kind of jobs their family members had for generations.

So, maybe you shouldn't get too upset about the name of a mountain in Alaska, about giving it back its Native-American name.

Because, to tell you the truth, sometimes it doesn't help much.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "Marc Dion: Volume I," is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle