Posted on 05/09/2015 7:18:43 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In the summer of 1996 I got off a long flight at Baltimore to begin a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. My roommates-to-be were two Indian students who had rented a car to pick me up were somewhat unfamiliar with the roads. So, having taken a wrong turn off the highway, we found ourselves in West Baltimore, not far from Mondawmin Mall where two weeks ago rioting began in the wake of the custodial death of Freddie Gray. Out of the backseat I saw shabbily dressed people sitting on plastic chairs or on the stoops of their rowhouses. These houses were faced with a material that I later learned was called Formstone, a cheap composite that Baltimore's infamous son, filmmaker John Waters, once called the "polyester of brick." "We're in a bad neighbourhood," one of my roommates remarked while the other scanned the map for a way out. It took a while for us to find our way out, enough time for me to notice that all of these people — tired-looking older people walking with limps, sullen faced younger folk standing around like they had nowhere to go — were black. "White people are scared of coming here," I was informed. "And you should also stay out of these kinds of neighbourhoods, get mugged."
Formstone, patented in the 1920s and infamous for promoting and hiding seepage on the walls it covered, was also very much in evidence in Hamden, a neighbourhood not far from the University campus where the less affluent white people lived amongst car workshops and bars that sold two-dollar beers in cans, in houses outside which cheap garden ornaments — like the pink flamingos made famous by John Waters' camp classic of the same name — proclaimed the cultural and economic status of their occupants. In the first weeks of my stay in Baltimore I was advised to not go to these neighbourhoods either. I may not get mugged but with my skin colour I could get beaten up, I was told.
Baltimore was, I learned quickly enough, a divided city.
North of the University were the neighbourhoods of Roland Park and Guilford with their million-dollar homes and their manicured gardens. A modernist highrise apartment block, built by none other than Mies van der Rohe, was its architectural pride and you could see it right on Charles Street as you drove up north to Towson through the affluent Rodgers Forge neighbourhood which was later to produce the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, Michael Phelps. East of Guilford was York Road across which lay more bad neighbourhoods, the black ones. All the through streets within Guilford were blocked on the York Road side. No one could drive in through there which made it easier, I guess, to pretend that no one lived across there.
Baltimore was divided, not just between black and white, but also between poor and rich.
This was all supposed to change, we were told in the late 1990s. Large companies were beginning to open offices downtown. Money was coming back into the city, the bad times were over. And money did come back into the city. There was construction everywhere downtown. But when the new buildings began to take shape we saw that they were all parking lots. The new jobs were coming, but the people who would do them would live in the suburbs. They would come into the city during the day, park their cars, go to work, have a drink or two in the bars around downtown and drive home. Some jobs were also created for those who lived in the city: they cleaned up the offices late at night.
Why are people rioting on the streets of an American city? Why doesn't the government of the richest country in the world help them? Possibly the answer is that there are two Americas: one is college-educated and upwardly mobile, the other is under-skilled and stuck with no place to go. And governments are often peopled by Americans from the first of these two Americas who don't understand what the people in the second America want. To illustrate this, here's an anecdote, a gentle but violent one:
Somewhere in the early 2000s the City of Baltimore, under the stewardship of Mayor O'Malley — who may challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination this year — decided that they needed to raise the spirit of Baltimore. Chicago has recently installed painted wooden cows all around the city and the public had responded very positively. So the City of Baltimore decided to do something similar. Baltimore's best known produce is crabs but, possibly because crabs are difficult to sculpt, they decided to install woodenfish all over the city. It was a reprehensible idea and when one such fish appeared on the intersection where I lived — an intersection where cars had been broken into on three of four corners, the fourth being a no-parking zone — I was very upset. After a few days of mulling it over I decided to write a note and paste it on the fish: This is offensive, remove it. Later that day on my way back home I saw that someone had hacked the head off the fish with a chainsaw. Now that, I say, full of pride for the place that I considered home for six years, is the spirit of Baltimore.
Money don’t fix broken homes and the neighborhoods that results from them.
My brain actually hurts from reading that.
This guy finds fish “offensive.”
We regret to inform you that your submission did not pass the Turing test.
That article seemed to be missing some pages. Made no sense
Might have been his grandmother.
The political class doesn't want the underclass to be educated because then they wouldn't vote Democrat.
The fish thing at the end was pretty weird and unexpected...
perhaps the author was trying to channel O’Henry.
They also don’t want them to have jobs. Hence the importation of cheap illegal labor. (soon to be legal if they have their way)
The problem is: DemocRAT RULE - I believe it’s been 15-20 years .. so what you see IS WHAT YOU GET FROM THE DEMS.
When are people going to wake up and stop electing these people ..??
There’s some serious “lost in translation” going on in that author’s mind. Maybe he’s a victim of some bad Baltimore crab meat.
Have I had a stroke? I cant make those words turn into a concept.
“I saw shabbily dressed people sitting on plastic chairs.”
If they were drinking beer in the morning, it might have been my family reunion.
If they were shooting at their empties, then I KNOW it was my family reunion.
de Tocqueville, he's not.
And he certainly doesn't understand the LBJ/DNC/Alinsky, etc. theories of black usefulness, either.
Why doesn’t he mention that Baltimore was the home town of Babe Ruth? Maybe because he’s from a country where they play cricket instead of baseball?
Probably fraudulently labelled Chinese imported stuff.
More like 50 years.
All kinds of people from the lower classes get into the middle and upper classes through hard work. People such as Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Henry Ford, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Ronald Reagan, Ike, Lincoln and millions more. We’ve spent $22 trillion dollars on “helping them” just since 1965. Our treasure chest is not bottomless.
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