your brother's keeper

So I see that you northern Michiganders or maybe it's the libertarians, or probably it's both, echo the proud question of Cain from olden days, "Am I my brother's keeper?"  Of course in that case Abel was trying to cover up a murder, somehow thinking he could put one over on god, and failed to beat the rap and got all of humankind tossed out of that swell garden and made us mortal and maybe worse than that, made us all get jobs.  One wonders why St Augustine didn't chose this event to be the original sin.  Murder is worse than eating some apple, which probably wasn't even an apple.

I just wanted to quote a little scripture, and you, as a bible scholar, know that scripture can be used any which way to prove whatever point.  And in this case I get the distinct impression that northern Michigan doesn't feel much loyalty to southern Michigan.  Probably northern Michigan liked southern Michigan better when Detroit was an economic engine and paying those fat taxes that built the roads and other infrastructure that made northern Michigan a leafy paradise.

But times change.  I kind of feel that way about the suburbs here, the way they owe their existence to the city, but now they want to turn their backs on it and leave those nasty urban problems behind.  And what are those nasty urban problems?  The noise and the dirt, but mainly the poor, with their unsightly neighborhoods, their petty crime, their constant drain on resources.

It's mainly a problem of big cities because when the jobs the poor once had fade away they can't afford to chase them out to the burbs and it's the place to seek your fortune if you don't have one.  It kind of taints the image of big cities because those living in burbs and small towns come to think of cities as being composed of a bunch of freeloaders.

But Flint is not a big city.  I've been there. 

No I haven't.  Thank goodness for google maps and wiki for helping me avoid an embarrassing mistake.  I've been to Benton Harbor, the poor sister of St Joseph at the southern edge of Lake Michigan about a tenth of the size of Flint.  But I think they are both alike in having lost jobs and being populated mainly by poor black people left behind by the whites who left with the jobs. 

Knowing your homebody tendencies I'm going to guess that you have never been to Flint or to Detroit either, so I'll tell you my view of Benton Harbor.  It is a hellhole.  The downtown is empty, the streets and sidewalks are shabby, in truth I did not want to investigate the residential areas.

Well it's their fault isn't it?  It's their city, and didn't they wreck their bed and now it is only fitting that they should lie in it?  But it's not like the people who live there now ever ran the city, they worked the menial jobs.  When the whites began leaving the black people began to get elected to the city government, but like as not, they weren't as well educated as their white predecessors, and the people that elected them like as not, being also uneducated, didn't make the best choices, and then what do you do when jobs leave your city?  What are the wise choices that could be made?

It's time for me to get on to my other pursuits, but I will be back tomorrow.  Let me wrap up a bit.  I don't think it's fair to blame the poor for their misfortunes.  This water thing, indications are that the overseers knew the water was bad and didn't do shit about it until just lately, and I think that's the main scandal.  We have a bit of the same situation here with a Republican governor threatening to take over Chicago schools so that he can break the teacher's union.  And though I have been pouring a lot of blame on the burbs and the small towns, we city folk are pretty insensitive to our poor also.