Rioting and Looting in Chicago

It's the same story in a number of places. For decades I watched the decline of my grandmothers neighborhood in Baltimore every time I would go there to visit. The poverty and crime and crumbling infrastructure was literally spreading like a virus block by block over the years. At first her part of town was "normal" and "Baltimore" was many blocks away. Every year that garbage creeped closer and closer to her neighborhood with businesses closing, families moving out, whole blocks of townhomes boarded up and left to crumble. Fast forward to today and now that neighborhood is literally ONE BLOCK away from "Baltimore" whereas before that crap was all the way across town. Before her passing she told me that she no longer even left her home anymore, the violence and the crime had finally reached her and she no longer felt safe even going down the street to the store. Other family in the area would bring her all her needs, she wouldn't leave home.

And now that whole area is just like you described south LA, nothing but bail bonds joints, liquor stores, and a couple run down gas stations that literally look like the reception area at Pelican Bay when you go in there to buy a damn soda.

It's utterly disgusting what has happened to these communities as the result of the low life trash that runs amok destroying these places and driving away businesses and driving down property value. Hers was a high value neighborhood (in relative terms) when she first purchased that home. Now that home is literally worth pennies because the entire area looks like a refugee camp. And NO AMOUNT OF GOVERNMENT MONEY is going to fix that at this point. Government money gets you the low riser projects in Baltimore. Been there plenty of times, used to play with kids there. That TV show The Wire? That place is REAL, the entire TV show is REAL, Baltimore IS REALLY LIKE THAT and it literally looks EXACTLY like that and the people are REALLY like that.

Thats what government subsidies get you, it's pennies and projects. Even "better" projects turn into the projects because the local trash ruins the places. Happened in my home town (I'm not from Baltimore, most of my family is). In my home town in the South the government actually tried again to "help" the black community. Across the street from the old projects they build brand new NICE low income apartments. I actually moved in there after I turned 18 and was one of the first tenants. I went back home a couple years after leaving and decided to drive by and take a look at my old apartment and low and behold, it's trashed. The "projects" from across the street spread to the new NICE apartments and turned them into the projects. There were literally 2 cop cars out there when I happen to just roll on by. I went to the gas station around the corner to grab a drink and surprisingly the old lady who worked there when I lived there was still there at the register and remembered me. After a brief convo of her telling me how proud she was that I was "out of here" I asked her what the actual hell happened to our nice apartments? Her response was simple and heartbreaking "The youngin's from the drews took it over". "Drews" was the slang term for the original trash projects from across the street.

So what happened in normal terms? The local trash from the original run down drug dealer run projects decided to set up shop in the brand new nice low income apartments and trash those too. When I lived there it was all well to do college kids and elderly folks. Now it's all drug dealers and trash with cops patrolling every 10 seconds.

Take the damn trash out, your communities will NEVER EVER get any better as long as they are allowed to roam free. I 100% guarantee it. Unlike the vast majority of folks here I LIVED IN THESE PLACES, I've seen this with my own eyes and experienced it all. You will NEVER fix this until you fix THAT. Period.

 

Thanks, me too!

This can be fixed, but it's going to take some serious "doing" that I don't think would work anymore in 2020.

I have seen it done before but it took some seriously shady crap to make it work. It literally happened in my home town. The other "hood" besides the one mentioned in the earlier post was turned completely around 180 degrees virtually overnight. However, it took some serious community "understanding" and looking the other away while the city did what could only be described as a legitimate RAID on that entire place. I'm not going to lie, I'm not the one who tosses the racist word out very often but if somebody wanted to call what they did racist I'd have trouble arguing against them....Not racist because they were rounding up criminals but because they were seriously rounding up EVERYBODY and then letting you go if they found out you honestly weren't doing anything wrong...

I lived across the highway from this area and what the city authorized was literally a moonlight raid and they arrested damn near EVERYBODY. I knew all of these people, we went to school together and I used to play in the park in that hood. Literally at the crack of dawn one morning the cops came in and tossed virtually EVERY SINGLE black person with dreadlocks into paddy wagons and took off. Mothers were outside screaming and kids crying it was insane. The kicker here is that the majority of these houses were funded via 100% drug money. So when the dealer went to prison that morning the money was gone. About 90% of that entire area was evicted. A few weeks later the houses foreclosed and I guess a company bought them all up or something and bulldozed the entire area. The park where I used to play was a well known open air drug dealing location. They bulldozed the entire thing.

About a year later they had rebuilt the entire neighborhood with brand new middle class houses. Where did the families of these drug dealers go who lost their homes? I honestly have no idea. But within a mere couple of years that entire "hood" had been transformed into a thriving middle class neighborhood with a brand new park with tennis courts and basketball courts and a baseball field, brand new gas stations, brand new restaurants, they even built a full blown Wal Mart there. And where once open air drug deals were conducted in broad daylight there is now a neighborhood little league baseball team playing at a brand new park.

The investors came back, and my Aunt who lives right across from the park who's porch I sat on watching this whole thing happen is thrilled.

Honestly I have zero idea how they legally did any of this but they did it.

They took out the trash. That's how you fix Chicago. That's how you fix Baltimore.

Good luck with that in 2020 though. So nowadays when folks ask me as someone who has lived in these places how to fix the "black community" I simply shrug my shoulders and say "leave". You can stay and fight if you want to, keep tossing money at it, whatever. Chicago is sinking, Baltimore is sinking, you ain't plugging that hole I don't care what ANYBODY says.

Abandon ship. I live a comfortable middle class lifestyle in a nice big house with a nice deck and a grill I'm about to use to cook dinner far far away from these hellhole communities...I don't live in these places I don't care what they do.

I know what'll work, whether society is willing to do it is on them. As I've said for years and years after each Presidential and/or Congressional election with new proposals that folks keep swearing will "help"....

Good Luck

 

You're trying to use logic and reason common sense regarding why rioters are destroying things....

You know better than that...

 

The "anger" that you are seeing isn't in regards to slavery in the literal sense. Only the most fanatical of people support things like reparations for slavery. That's a radical far left proposal that the majority of folks regardless of political affiliation don't support, in the literal sense.

The "issue" isn't slavery itself or the aftermaths and seeking justice for that but rather what the centuries of oppression of black people in America has done to black people today. If you scrape off the top layer of radical left wing nonsense what you'll find underneath is an argument that does have some merit. Are black people alive today still subjected to some of the EFFECTS of centuries of oppression of black people? The answer to that is actually yes, but nowhere NEAR the level that BLM and company are trying to make you believe.

On one hand you have folks saying yeah slavery, oppression, Jim Crow etc sucked but that was years ago and it's over now. We're all the same and we're all equal and have equal opportunities now so lets start from TODAY and go forward. On the other hand you have the RATIONAL counter argument that yes even though we are all equal today on a level playing field, those who weren't oppressed have a head start so we need to help actually level the playing field by either disabling some of the perks of that head start or sort of "boosting" black people forward. And there is some merit to that, at least enough to where when you ignore the radical nutcases like BLM and Antifa I'd be willing to listen to an argument like that.

When that argument is made folks aren't talking about "everybody", of course not all white people are born in the middle class with a stable household and whatnot and not all black people are born in poverty. However due to systems put in place by the government and society during the era of Jim Crow my parents were NOT ALLOWED to be "middle class" even if they tried, and neither were my grandparents. That lead to a disproportionate amount of black children born into poverty because there was very little "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make it in America" for my parents growing up. They didn't have that opportunity....Black folks were by and large forced into poverty as second class citizens by the government and kept there which lead to the majority of black people born from that generation, like myself, born into poverty. Lets not pretend that it's not much easier to succeed when you aren't born into poverty....It's not impossible by any means, I'm walking proof of that, but my kids (if I choose to have any) will surely have a hell of an easier time than I did because I am comfortable middle class.

I'm sorry but no, as critical as I am of the black community (and rightfully so) there is no way that we as a whole have largely remained in poverty stricken communities for decades by nothing more than our own doing. Part of that IS because of the aforementioned reasons. How much of that is the result of the oppression of a mere generation ago? I have no idea, but SOME of it is. We are not genetically inferior to any other race who no matter what just can't get right. There is something else that has played a part in that.

Am I defending these looters and rioters or any of these BLM folks who are looting and rioting? Hell no, they are idiots. But underneath all of that there IS an argument that does hold some merit but most of them who are out there destroying their own neighborhoods are too stupid to know what it is and aren't actually doing it for any rational reason.

The problem is that the time to "right that wrong" has long gone. It's flat out immoral for the government to do something like pay out reparations for Jim Crow using taxpayer money taken from current working Americans. There is literally no moral way to do that anymore. The time to do that, if we so chose, would have been in 1966 when the folks who instilled and/or benefited from those policies of oppression were the working class. I can't expect YOU to pay ME for what your parents did to my parents, or if your parents didn't have to suffer the same injustice as my parents. That's asinine.

I agree that we as a society do have to "get over it", not because we don't care about what happened but because there is literally no way to "right" it now under any sort of moral pretense whatsoever.

 

Ha, same deal with me hence the reason my family is from Baltimore but I'm not. Long story short I too will never forget the day my father rolled up in Baltimore and dragged me away kicking and screaming from my friends and mother in Baltimore. He knew that place, both of my parents grew up there, and he knew that a black boy in Baltimore, especially in that neighborhood where my mother lived, was for all intents and purposes....doomed. So he rolls up one morning and tosses me in the car with my mother throwing a scene in the yard. All he kept yelling at her was "No! I told you I was coming, he's NOT staying here, he will not make it here! You have our daughter, the boy is coming with me. Call the cops then!". And off we drove hundreds of miles to the deep South. Where we went was no paradise, but it wasn't inner city Baltimore Maryland. I hated him for that, all my friends were there, my best friend lived behind me in the alley, I didn't say a word for the entire trip.

Then low and behold I go back to Baltimore to visit years later and find out my best friend from behind the alley is dead, shot to death. My sisters boyfriend was in the hospital having been beaten to a pulp with a bike lock for trying to fight off someone who was stealing his bike. And the entire place was even worse somehow than it was when I was there....

Now even decades later every single time I talk to my father on the phone I thank him for kidnapping me from Baltimore. Thank you for having the courage to do what was RIGHT even if everybody around him hated him for it, including my mothers entire family and including me. It was no cake walk growing up where we went, but it wasn't Baltimore....

And because of that single decision, today I wake up in my nice peaceful rural middle class neighborhood surrounded by forests to the sound of wildlife rummaging through my shed instead of sirens and gunfire.

Life indeed, is good.