Detachment

I don't want to secede from anybody, to secede is to leave. I want to stay where I am and make the people I don't like go away. I don't want to chase people out of their homeland, I just want to detach their homeland from my homeland. Throughout history, people have spent a lot of energy fighting over land. Then, when they get the land, they have to do something with the people who are already there, and it's usually not pretty. When a state takes over somebody else's land, it is said that they annex it. It seems like the opposite of annexation would be detachment. It would be like granting independence to the territory without the consent of the people who live there. Historically, land has frequently been annexed without the consent of its residents, so why can't we detach it the same way?

I don't think the people of Detroit allowed Cheboygan exiles to work there out of the goodness of their hearts. They had job openings that were not being filled by their local people, Cheboygan people heard about it, and applied for some of those jobs. I doubt that the auto companies actively recruited Cheboygan people. It's more likely that they advertised the job opening in their local newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, to which people all over Michigan subscribe. If Detroit locals wanted those jobs, it seems they would have been hired first because they wouldn't have had to travel 250 miles to submit their applications.

I think that most historians would agree that the riots initiated the long downhill slide of Detroit. There were other factors, but it began with the riots. The landlords and shopkeepers were reluctant to rebuild and, if they did, they probably would have had a hard time getting insurance. Many properties were abandoned by their owners and ended up being seized for non payment of taxes. These derelict buildings became hangouts for druggies, teenagers, and other undesirables, which drove out whatever value may have been left in them. I'm not sure about the chronology, but I think all this happened before the decline of the auto plants. Of course that doesn't mean that one thing caused the other, any more than it means the other thing caused he one. I think that, by the time the auto plants were in trouble, most of their employees weren't living in the city limits anyway.  

We have discussed my racial attitudes before. I left Chicago before the troubles started because I didn't like living in the city. If I had been there when the shit hit the fan, I probably would have moved to the suburbs like everybody else. Well, everybody but you. All I know about Detroit is what I have heard from other people or read in the newspaper. I never had any intention of moving there, if I had wanted to live in a big city, I would have stayed in Chicago. You have said that there are Blacks living in your building, but I'm sure they don't behave like the Blacks who live in the "bad" neighborhoods outside the Loop. If your building were to be "taken over" by people like that, I'm sure that you would move out as would anybody else in their right mind. It's not as much about racial preferences as it is about quality of life and simple survival. Thank God that I live in a swamp next to a junk yard! There's not much that anybody could do to ruin this neighborhood.