Of course, I had to go and look up the history of ghettos in America.
You see, I joke that I have a mind like a stainless steel lint trap: it only retains the most useless stuff. However, this is not even true, really. The truth is that I have a mind like Indy when he’s bored. I will not only chase after any irrelevant distraction that crosses my path, but I will then, with absolute determination, take it apart, examine the parts, and then bat it around till it ends up under the (metaphorical, ontological) fridge, where it’s out of my reach.
And having started thinking about how much the song “In The Ghetto” annoys me, because its assumptions are so wrong they’re not even in the right universe, I found myself trying to figure out what American ghettos actually were. I mean, we all heard about them over and over, but what were they, REALLY? Because they weren’t the same as European Jewish ghettos where Jews were confined by law, and often not allowed to be out of after sundown or whatever. (Depending on the time and place.)
The answer is… complicated. As of course such things are because America has a massive hole in the head when it comes to race, both seeing it where it never existed, and then trying to erase it in weird, government centric ways, when not trying to emphasize it in weird, government centric ways. Take it from someone who grew up abroad, and whose ideas of race are either far more complicated than American culture — each nation a race! Forget genetics, hits history! — or far more simple — who gives a d*mn about race? It’s culture that matters! — that America’s way of thinking/handling/dealing with the fact that humans come in different skin tones and sets of features is bizarre enough it will eventually give archeologists headaches.
In the sense that the lending/selling apparatus of the US was for a time weaponized in the service of segregation of the races (due to governmental decree) America could be said to have — for a time at least — have had real ghettos. This was an artifact of law and finance, not of the people on the ground. And such ghettos, being imposed from above tended thereby to become… limited and limiting of those confined to them.
Or in other words, it limited the choices and ability to thrive of people who were more or less unwillingly confined into them.
However, if wikipedia is to be believed (and I’m not giving them a link, because they rarely are) the term ghetto also applies to what they call “voluntary segregation” which according to them (rolls eyes till she sees her own brain) is still going on today. Also according to them ghettos aren’t just racial, but also economic, because people want to segregate from icky poor people and —
Bah.
I’m sure some of you are for more versed on this than I am, however the whiff I started to get is that ghettos is applied to everything the do-gooders and impersonal planners don’t approve of. If your neighborhood is not what they’d like then stomp, stomp, stomp it’s a ghetto and it needs to be broken apart, dispersed, gentrified, de-gentrified and made into something they like.
And what do I mean by gentrified and de-gentrified? How can they want to do both?
Oh dear. So. You have to understand that the Planners That Would Be don’t really have a vision. They just have a naked will to power that they disguise under wanting to do good.
No. I’m being uncharitable. let me rephrase that. Most of them desperately want to do good, but don’t cope well with unintended consequences, which in turn causes them to waver back and forth, in search of an ideal state that can’t happen. The fact that this causes their solution to end up being the worst of both worlds is probably lost on them. Or maybe gives them another “cause” to pursue ad infinitum.
What I mean is that because their definition of ghetto is insane, it applies not only to blighted urban neighborhoods, segregated by race and thereby confined and limiting as to human potential, but to simply neighborhoods that are poor or unsightly or to — in fact — under the “voluntary” segregation, historical black neighborhoods, rich and well-functioning in their own right.
Look, the left doesn’t like it when white people do it — while almost enforcing it when anyone else does — but humans do try to congregate in “looks like me” communities. This was fairly obvious to me, from the first week as an exchange student, during orientation in New York City. (It was also fairly baffling, as apparently I’m one of the very few people whose programming is broken because I don’t do this at all. But then again, Odd in every way.) In a college campus filled with hundreds of students from all over the world, those people who had taken the trouble of becoming students abroad, so they could experience a different culture, congregated in ethno-cultural groups. Like this: The Portuguese all clustered, but if there weren’t enough of them in an area, they’d aggregate with the Brazilians. Failing enough Brazilians, Portuguese and Spaniards would congregate. If not enough Spaniards, Portuguese would cleave to those of Spanish colonies, if– You get the point. People gravitated to people who either spoke similar languages, or looked alike. In ultimate “need” Portuguese would gravitate to Italians, Greeks and Arabs, because they all look “substantially alike.” (Though if you grow up in one of these, you can tell the others very easily, and even group them mentally by where they’re from. Whereas after 39 years in America, I have trouble telling the difference. Eh.)
It’s probably some very old programming in the back brain, because honestly, in pre-history the more someone looked like you, the better chance they were related/same tribe/related tribe, and the less chance you’d end up in the stew pot. (Judging by the archeological digs never a zero chance, but lower.)
So, yeah, people more or less self-segregate, not even along racial lines, but along “looks alike” lines.
What this means for a nation of immigrants like the US is that particularly for newcomers or people with strong racial differences that are visually obvious — black people, say, or Asians, but at a certain time or place, Italians and Irish — there tend to be entire neighborhoods where they self-segregate. I.e. they preferentially buy there, and if a stranger buys there, they are more or less glared out of the neighborhood, even if nothing worse happens to them. Trust me, most of the time you won’t even buy there, because when you go to look at the house, everyone glares at you. (Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience of shopping for houses in places with such neighborhoods.)
But these neighborhoods also have a culture of their own, and one which is very comfortable to the people buying in them. Whether you’re freed slaves from the South, or immigrants recently arrived from Italy, the ethnic neighborhood in a large city can provide a place where you’re comfortable and “at home” enough as you get a foothold in the new country or the more general culture.
Now, of course, those places have good and bad characteristics. One of the bad ones is that you don’t really integrate into the land to which you took the trouble to migrate (and freed slaves migrated to the North) or into the wider American culture which, frankly, has some pretty amazing advantages, in terms of world and cultures. What I mean is, if you live in a solid multi-block Italian (or Portuguese, or Jewish, or Vietnamese) neighborhood, you’re going to be operating by the rules of the country you came from. And you might not learn English very well or at all. This can be limiting as to where you shop, where you work, how far you go in school, or what type of professions you learn.
Which, yes, depending on what the culture is, can lead to ghettoization, understood as a limiting of opportunities and financial well-being. Now, for most cultures, and absent government interference (which has never been absent when applied to black people, alas) ghettos of this kind tend to break apart in three generations, or 100 years or so. As in people succumb to the lure of selling their place to well-paying strangers; kids are educated in the wider culture, intermarry and move away; osmosis occurs between the insular culture and the hosting country. (Excepted here are those communities, like, say Orthodox Jews who have a … ah… higher mandate to remain separated. Amish fall in this too, other than the fact that they, of course, aren’t urban. And, yes, a lot of the currently incoming Muslim immigrants might well fall into this as well.)
Anyway, the problem is that do-gooders, and particularly the kind of insufferable do-gooder mentality behind “In the ghetto” intervenes long before 100 years.
If the area of ethno-cultural segregation is poor and visually distinct (note that the insufferable song would never be written about Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, because the culture simply doesn’t lend itself to it.) the do gooders will look at it as “something must be done.”
And weirdly the something that must be done very often involves big projects that forcibly relocate people and demolish the homes they are attached to, while relocating these people who might or might not be poor, but who have been integrated in a functioning community into big urban projects with the chronically poor afflicted by various pathologies.
Look, when reading the definition of ghetto according to the liberals at Wikipedia, I flashed on the history of the black community in Denver. No, it really doesn’t exist now, not in terms of neighborhood, and it never existed that I knew it as such. It was long before my time, that the Five Points community in Denver, by the time I moved a trendy area being gentrified, used to be a fully functional community of black people who had immigrated from the South after the civil war. From everything I can read about it, it was fully functioning, and a supportive and culturally functional community of its kind. By this I mean it looked after its own and had rules that supported youth growing up functional and families forming and staying together. (It’s hard to be sure, because when researching it, you have to filter out all the bias for and against depending on when the stuff was written.)
It also grated on do-gooders nerves, mostly because, yes, it was restrictive. As in, it wasn’t a “do your own thing” community, but one that enforced its rules, but also because it was poor (again for various reasons) and had some characteristics of rural Southern culture which seems to ping most Americans raised outside it, as both poor and annoying.
And so… enter urban renewal. People had their houses bought from under them and were relocated and dispersed “for their own good” and the area became more blighted, as tends to happen, in between government buildings and … well, nothing much.
From what I can tell urban planners for a while had an habit of targeting and breaking functional black communities that were mostly “poor but honest” in the sense that while economically they might not have been anything much, they had a supportive culture that enabled those who wanted to do well in the wider world (as soon as mandatory segregation was lifted.)
Now, here’s the thing: that stuff can be good and bad. I mean, the area itself, eventually, can end up being more prosperous. And those people who were dispersed and for a time had their lives destroyed, also might end up materially better off.
The problem is that as a rabbi who walked the shores of Galilee long ago said “Not of bread alone lives Man.”
And here I must bring my own experience and perception of this, because you see, in another country, and another time, the place where I grew up was one of those communities interfered with and improved for their own being.
The truth is that the place I grew up in was more town than village. I refer to it as village (almost hamlet) because the particular “neighborhood” I grew up in had that feel. It was at one time a Roman farm, part of a larger community. In fact the name for the area derived from the farming part of the latifundium. Nearby areas included “Forno” which from the fact that the ruins of a massive baking complex were found there, was where the communal ovens were, etc. Someone with an interest in linguistics could probably reconstruct the considerable holdings of some Roman Veteran awarded an estate in these barbarous (Celtic, largely) regions.
But the place I grew up in was one long street, maybe a mile and a half long, with large and small houses either side, and not much depth. There was a “back street” and alleys connecting the two, but mostly behind the front street and the back street, and a couple of streets branching off where the houses were rarer and the fields more common, it was all farms, fields, forests.
Insert here the fact that the area was apparently much larger and more prosperous before the Black Plague, and it must have been a market town of some importance, judging by the areal views showing ruins of buildings extending into what I thought — growing up — was forest primeval. That’s neither here nor there, just perhaps a bit of perspective on how things change, even absent governmental mandates and well intentioned do gooders with plans.
When I was growing up…. Well, I have it on good authority it was far more prosperous than when dad was growing up. Which considering that he grew up on the heels of the great depression (When America sneezes the world catches pneumonia) and on the heels of World War I and during World War II (Which even if Portugal stayed out of it, still immiserated the region) is not perhaps surprising.
However, when I was growing up, Brother’s characterization of us as being “poor as Job” was not precisely wrong. It would have irked grandmother no end, because we weren’t poor. We were those who “made do.” Let’s however say that any community in which people unravel last year’s sweater and dye the thread to make this year’s sweaters is not exactly flush with money. As is, my family was relatively well off, and had habits that made us seem more well off than we were, including habits of reading and learning and saving. Also we lived in a multi-room house, with a functional kitchen and a more or less functional bathroom (even if that was outside the back door. It was a bathroom, though, not an outhouse.)
The vast majority of the village, though, were tiny houses with perhaps two rooms (the kitchen and everything else) in which families with multiple children lived. As far as bathing, they availed themselves of communal facilities. And entire groups of buildings might share an outhouse, in arrangements that were positively medieval.
Needless to say, I have a soft-edged recollection of the village of my childhood. Truth be told, I miss it, and will perhaps one day get to walk its streets without those downsides of this earthly state, again in a better place. But I’m not blind to the fact it was a wretched place to live for most of these people, at least seen from the outside.
Seen from the outside? Well, I can tell you the fact that we used chamber pots (would you want to go to the bathroom outside in winter at night, as a small child? Or even an adult?) or that eight people shared a bathroom with only cold running water, or that the kitchen had no faucet and depended on water pumped from the well for all the washing up, or a million other inconveniences, struck neither myself nor my family as particularly onerous, even though being plunged into those circumstances now would be unendurable. I suspect the poorer people also viewed those as “just the way we live” and weren’t particularly bothered.
All the same, the village was improving. The “new generation” (My parents and those their age and younger) were either building new houses, which were — if still wretchedly inconvenient to how I live NOW and here — modern, clean and convenient (my parents’ house had two bathrooms for 4 people. Both of them indoors. With hot and cold running water. The lap of luxury.) or buying older houses and retrofitting them to 20th century standards. Some “buildings” of more than one residence were also going up, market driven by the lack of housing that met the standards of the younger people.
Needless to say this was not enough for governmental purposes. At any rate, they needed to build a highway and if they didn’t actively dislike the village, they also saw nothing much worth preserving. And let’s be honest, I’m fairly sure they considered us “blighted” and in need of improvement.
So not only was the new highway designed so it sliced the village neatly in two, but the only way over it, for people who lived there, was a pedestrian bridge. There was absolutely no reason this could not have been made into a bridge that admitted cars — in fact, the bridge is wide enough for that, which is why they had to put pillars across the top, because locals were blithely driving over it — and kept the functioning of the village — other than the parts demolished — intact.
Instead, the village was bisected, and the way around cumbersome enough that it was killed as a functioning culture and community. This combined with the new access to and from the city opened the way for a lot of Stack-a-prole apartment buildings, and for the community where I grew up to disappear under a forest of cement and imports-from-outside.
Now, realistically, and with no rose colored glasses, are the people living in the village better off than in the old days? Yep. Yep they are.
Most of the unsightly cement-block apartments have bathrooms, separate rooms for parents and children, and functional, usable kitchens. It is probably healthier, too.
The thing is those people aren’t the same who lived there. A lot of those were relocated to projects with the urban poor, because apparently planners see only income and not culture. A lot of others, the ones who sold the land these buildings are on, are probably living somewhere nearby. A lot of the people who used to live there simply cannot afford to buy even a condo in one of the buildings.
Everyone has become dispersed and rootless, and there is no community to speak of.
Is this better or worse? Well, I’ve talked about the restrictive and crab-bucketish characteristics of the village. Some people probably thrived when freed. On the other hand, there also isn’t the support of a shared culture and shared responsibilities and raising of children according to accepted principles.
In fact, ultimately what is achieved is the casting of people into the culture imposed by the centralized government which is mostly built by the people who look at any “poor” community of long standing and see a ghetto. Instead of the restrictive rules enforced by the old women, about dressing modestly, and “remediating” sin with marriage, and such, you get a restrictive culture about not using too much electricity because of “global warming” and of blaming all your failures on faceless others who are “holding you down.”
It’s double edged. Over all material comfort is increased. On the other hand, not only is Chesterton’s fence erased, but even the memory of there having been a fence, and any memory of self-sufficient communities who more or less looked after their own, however limited they might have been materially.
Perhaps superimposing my history and the history of the community I grew up in is what makes me flinch at the “do gooders” erasing the “ghettos” that existed as functional ethnic communities in US cities until the planners got to them.
Or perhaps I’m seeing something real, as judged by the fact that those same do-gooders seem to recognize that after their interference and the inevitable “gentrification” that sweeps in, with developers making what remains into “quaint” lofts and “distinctive” residences for the very rich, a displaced population is left markedly poor in a way they can’t quite quantify.
The do-gooders then “solve” this by railing against heartless “gentrification” and the rich people who “chased’ the poor off. When the poor were in fact already chased off by stupid planning interference.
Do I have a solution? No. I neither have it nor do I believe I should. I think communities should be left to evolve and live and die naturally without regulations trying to shape them into someone’s idea of paradise.
I mean, in my ideal world, anyone from outside a community coming in and deciding they ought to break it up/rebuild it according to someone’s idea of sanitary and prosperous, would be met with a bunch of locals with shotguns and told to go back and mind their own business.
But then in my ideal world, the government leaves the people alone, except for guarding the borders and minding the highways.
Which means my ideal world might as well be Narnia, considering how unreachable it is.
All in all, it makes me even more upset about “In the Ghetto” which seems to be the rallying cry of the do gooders, making the uninformed all worked up about a problem that might or might not exist, and weaponized to go interfere with someone else’s life.
And that’s my own, semi-informed and pretty ranty view of the matter.
According To Hoyt 
Just another expression of the belief that people are interchangeable cogs.
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Very good.
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The US Constitution prohibits simply taking property without compensation, and much due process hoops.
Some sonofabitches came up with “urban blight” to get around that ban. Thus, magic word “blighted” the city can “redevelop” the “blighted” land, purely by coincidence taking it at fire sale price from the prior owners and delivering it for chump change to the new (politically connected) owner.
“Ghettoes” are of course inherently “blighted”, donchaknow. Perfect for running through an Interstate, or building a new convention center.
Or for bringing to the local government any number of State and/or Federal grants to “solve” the magic word, which of course means never -ever- solving the magic word goose that lays the granted eggs.
So those “blighted” places either get leveled for some crony’s moneymaker, or they get ground into shitheaps to better draw more money and featherbed jobs from elsewhere. Any real gains get redirected to higher priorities, thus preserving the bait. If it gets -too- shitty, or fails to draw enough moolah, you can always “de-blight” it with bulldozers.
See also “trailer park”, “failed farm”, etc.
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See also … Kelo vs City of New London – the Little Pink House eminent domain lawsuit.
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That whole development collapsed and as far as I know they haven’t built a damn thing on it. Where it used to be two hundred year old houses it is nothing, but it did improve the view for several mansions. And all that wonderful tax money they were supposed to get, is gone up in smoke. Serves Ct, right, what a totally mismanaged screwed up Democrat state, they deserve it.
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No, they don’t. You don’t know how much of that is fraud.
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See the nice vacant lot where the houses were.
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My sister’s neighborhood in San Jose got zoned as “blighted” once. The neighborhood owners had enough money and clout to make a HUGE uproar and get that designation reversed, with photos proving that whoever came up with that designation must have had an agenda, since it’s a very nice neighborhood and the only things that even came close to “blight” were the local frat houses.
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Never, ever give do-gooders power.
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forgot to click the box
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The best resource would be Thomas Sowell whose works includes “Black Rednecks and White Liberals“.
My un-scholarly experiences and observations is that there almost is always a sorting based on income and race/culture in the US in towns and cities. (Going to exclude the rural folks, because much of that isn’t concentrated to a high degree and varies by area.)
In the Dallas area, intergration and busing of school kids, led to waves of mostly white and higher income families to flee to the suburbs and later to the suburbs of the suburbs. It wasn’t just race, but a cultural invasion that got worse over time as the Welfare state and state sponsored cultural degeneracy (single moms, drugs, gangsta lifestyle, etc…) poured fuel on the fire.
But the do gooders haven’t stopped. Instead of trying to plant Section 8 apartment complexes in neighborhoods that fight them toe and nail, the Left has enticed cities into forcing developers into offering discounts based on a certain percentage of the complex’s units being “lower income” in a tiered fashion. And it’s not purely a income means test, since they look at the overall demographics and will sue if their non-income “percentages” aren’t met. Cities/developers that don’t met this requirement will be sued.
And in addition, cities can’t pass or enforce anti-immigrant housing ordinances.
This would be fine if all individuals from all cultures were uniformly high trust and well behaved as the Left claims them to be. But it’s so bad that the state and local governments are fudging crime statistics by not reporting, under reporting, or reporting everyone as “white” so the locals can’t be accused as “racist”.
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There was a local low-income project that got nixed by the city council because it was in the old town area, right next to the new library and several breweries, but far away from any services. The state sued them, and the city council argued back that they had multiple low-income projects in the works at better locations, this one was just badly placed.
Oh, the cries of NIMBY from people out of the area. All the people who were local pretty much knew that this particular one—which was specifically marketed as being for a particular “transitional” group that included recovering alcoholics—was just a bad idea.
Anyway, that developer is begrudgingly placing their buildings somewhere other than the oldest part of town. The lawsuit is probably still going through.
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Before we moved to our new neighborhood last year, the city, along with a NGO, played shenanigans with us by placing a womans shelter in the middle of a our residental neighborhood.
It was sold to us as a normal house for a disabled war veteran and their family. What we got was a large two story boarding house for woman, not necessary woman vets, but a half way house for female drug users that had jail time.
Clue the drama, thefts and the police visits. Also the bi-annual parade of cars for the big corporate sponsors “Day of Service” virtue signaling events that block driveways and trash pickup, instead of parking at the park.
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A halfway house for alcoholics, conveniently located near several breweries. Yeah, that’s got success written aaallll over it.
Oh, I know, it’s supposed to give them practice resisting temptation!
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I remember an interview with Charlton Heston where he talked about making ‘Planet Of The Apes’.
The Ape costumes were elaborate constructs including makeup and cosmetic appliances, which took hours to put on early in the morning and weren’t removed until shooting concluded for the day. Thus, everybody ate lunch in costume.
Charlton observed that the actors, without thinking about it, segregated themselves into groups according to their costumes. The chimpanzee actors sat together, the gorillas sat together, the orangutans sat together, and the human cavemen sat together. All without consciously deciding to, or any consideration for who they were under the costumes. People who would never have eaten lunch together as themselves did, just because they wore matching costumes.
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I have heard many times, usually from devout Christians deploring this fact, that “Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America”.
My reaction has always been, “It’s self-segregation. Nobody’s keeping white people from attending black churches, or black people from attending white churches. So what’s wrong with people wanting to attend church with other people from their own culture, where they’re comfortable?” And note that culture often correlates strongly with skin color, which is why lots of people mistake cultural clashes for racism. But there are always exceptions — the white guy whose parents had a job in Nigeria when he was a kid, for example, who feels more comfortable in an African church (African, not African-American: different culture) than in an American church because the African worship style feels like home.
When I was in my twenties, I went through training on how to work cross-culturally, to prepare me for the job I now have working and living overseas. The trainees (all Christians, because we were working for a Christian non-profit organization) were assigned various churches in the area to attend for a month, from cultures other than their own. Many of them ended up in Korean churches, but I was assigned to attend an African-American church. I was the only white person in the congregation — but nobody cared. I was welcomed, and treated as if I was a long-lost relative: part of the family even though I didn’t really know anyone yet. Whenever my wife and I are in that part of the US, we make a point of going out to visit them, and they still welcome us warmly.
Self-segregation does not mean there is racism going on. It’s just the natural human tendency to sort ourselves into groups where we fit in, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. While it can be the result of racial prejudice, or more likely cultural prejudice, it can also result from perfectly good motives, and have no element of racial or cultural animus whatsoever. As my experience demonstrates.
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My church on Sunday morning is pretty integrated. Of course, I also happen to live on the fringes of one of the most integrated cities in the country, so that’s less surprising. But the people with Spanish as their first language are still going to go to the Spanish mass, and the Filipinos are going to attend the Tagalog mass. It’s just easier.
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The crazy continues with “urban planning” and the associated insanity that it imposes. A great example is St. Paul Minnesota where the brand new interstate system (the American Autobahn) back in the day punched I-94 through a thriving neighborhood which was “blighted” I’m sure and sliced the community there in two. It went much the way Sarah’s post describes. Today, the urge to keep tinkering is to now recreate the old neighborhood and magically make it wonderful!
https://www.startribune.com/group-pushes-replacing-i-94-between-minneapolis-and-st-paul-with-a-thoroughfare/600356033/
The urban ‘light rail’ projects pushed into many neighborhoods all over the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro also carved up communities and have produced a much less desirable area. But, hey – they had to have the magic choo-choo because of global something or other and of course equity! I’m very glad to have left that all behind and now live in a more (not totally) sane place.
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Personally, I love the reduced speed to, what was it?, 35 mph, on the St. Paul side of 494.
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Don’t live in Democrat Controlled cities or states. If you do, move before the property rates fall. As far as the Federal Government is concerned, maybe Iran will do us a favor and Nuke DC and all the horrid Democrats and Rhino’s that live there. One can hope.
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🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵
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As a note, a lot of these college kids that get dorm rooms at the big universities…they lived better (i.e. better places, better amenities, better locations) than I did for nearly twenty years in the Bay Area. They have about the same floorspace, but access to a lot and are being told “how much they’re sacrificing” for a formal degree.
And when they’re told that “people live worse” than them…they think it’s someone like me (decent apartment with Crazy Roommate, decent commute, have to drive to a lot of places, but…), not a lot of people near me that live worse and don’t care what sort of pigsty they’re living in.
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A close relative served bench warrants in a big Eastern city run by Donks. I was shocked at the self-inflicted shitshow resident stories.
Toilets overflowing with poop, so use the tub. It’s also full.
Bedroom full of garbage, to bed level, with trench to door. Surface disturbances moving as the rats scurry.
Those, by the way, were not the worst.
Some folks set out to be other than human. Some of those proselytize and recruit.
And it isn’t just “urban”. Plenty of similar in low-end trailer parks, rural houses, etc.
We have civilizations. That doesn’t make us automagically civilized.
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I’m reminded of that once scene in “Heat” where Al Pacino’s character tells his (soon-to-be-ex) wife why he doesn’t talk about what he does on the job as a homicide detective.
It goes right along with Dad’s stories of watching juries full of white, middle-class, middle-aged women (who tended to be the only people that had time to serve on a jury) have not a single clue why someone would do something that terrible to a human being. And this was tame in comparison to some of the stories Dad has told me. Stories that I know are not the worst things I know he saw when he was a cop.
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Our minister’s wife is a retired teacher, and yet she’s been sheltered enough she just can’t understand how Jesus could be so rude to the Syro-Phoenician woman. I like her a bunch, but words just fail me on that.
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On 9/11 I was working retail, mostly young women, and the level of disbelief they had was very high. “I just don’t know how someone could deliberately kill children,” on said, referring to one of the hijacked planes.
I wasn’t all that much older, but I’d gotten the implications right off. So had any of the older employees. Middle-class, yeah, but not sheltered.
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I have an uncle that, before he started his own carpet laying business, worked for someone else who took a contract on one of the local reservations. It took over a year to get a house built because the locals would steal everything every night. These were federally funded houses/apartments so the locals could move out of their tarpaper and tin roof shacks. And not just the stuff that wasn’t locked down. Plumbing installed during the day? Come back the next morning and it was gone. Same with electrical. All of the contractors had to spend extra time each day unloading equipment and then packing it back up again before they left so they could take it with them. Otherwise – gone.
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There’s the story of a contractor who was putting up a fence around a soon to be started construction area in Chicago. While his crew was putting up the fence a local cop stopped by and asked what security company they had contracted with and could he meet that night’s guard. When he was told they didn’t have a company yet and there wouldn’t be a guard, the cop told them they’d better get one as soon as possible as it was a high crime area.
Contractor said they’d have one by the end of the week because that’s when the equipment would be on site but there wasn’t anything to guard yet.
Cop just shook his head.
Next morning the locked and secured fence was gone.
And, no, it wasn’t a case of bad cop facilitating theft. They just didn’t have the manpower to monitor everything.
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We have a few contractors that live around here and are friends of the family (retired or semi-retired, mostly). They talk about how they worked job sites-in the Bay Area, in reasonably “good” areas-where they had to take all their tools home with them, including big things like generators, because they would be stolen overnight. Or job sites would need 24/7 armed security because there were organized gangs (mostly Central/South American) who would strip the copper wiring and pipes from unfinished buildings for the salvage value.
It’s also why Harbor Freight exists. If somebody rips the stuff off your truck, while you’re on the job site, and you need it the next day or else you’re out of a job…if the tool from Harbor Freight keeps you employed and you can buy a new one after it breaks when the check clears…
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“Or job sites would need 24/7 armed security”
Well, that used to work…. until the gangs figured out the guards couldn’t do jack because if one of them shot the construction company ((retail store, etc.) would be sued by lawyers like Crump and the payday would be substantial.
Only way I see that working now is to pay the protection money under the table, and hope they stay bought.
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In our (limited) travels, we’ve been by construction sites that have high cranes. Hanging from the cranes, way, way, up, are huge generators. Presumption is not safe to leave on ground, or even high in the building. That as big as the generators were, they’d still walk away.
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It’s not just democratic cities, it’s coming everywhere now. Thanks O’Biden!
Not only do you need to watch your tools on the job site, you can’t leave them in your truck in your supposedly safe neighborhood suburb or town. There are crews that drive around, walk alleys, check doors and bust windows at night.
My relatives in the country used to laugh because I would lock my car when I visited them. After getting hit once or more, everyone locks everything. Plus I get requests for recommendations for video systems and such. Plus most make sure they have a dog or two if they didn’t have one before.
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It’s the immigration from societies where that’s normal.
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Sadly, the places where they’re immigrating to don’t have the sort of people who would respond to this by a proper beating. Or being buried in a corn field.
Because if law enforcement won’t bust these people and bust them hard, at some point people are going to have to defend themselves…and that’s not a good thing.
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Yeah. “You want vigilantes? This is how you get vigilantes.”
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See also “boobytraps”.
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Some do.
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And some are going to put a band-aid over a sucking chest wound. Like several of our cities where they’re putting up stop signs in place of streetlights, because the local homeless/trustees of modern chemistry are tapping the lines for the signal boxes for electricity.
And the usual response I get to “so, what do you propose to do about it” becomes “you can’t make people leave their stuff behind” or “you can’t make them get treatment!” or something like that.
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I’d bet those dogs are trained to detain, not just alarm, too. With video backup. Read a report where a family had this. They had highly trained horses on their property, theirs, and boarders. Some neighboring children kept trespassing. Parent of said children blew up when her children were detained in a field by the property dogs. Dog had video collars. The prosecution did not go the way the neighbors had hoped. Dogs were praised for their restraint, and the owners for the extensive on going training.
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Synchronicity! I just stumbled upon a group called “Strong Towns”. They seem to be advocating for less planning and more organic growth. I say “seem to” because I just found them and have watched only one of their YouTube videos.
There is a perennial problem with Leftist thought: Their ideas are not entirely wrong, but those ideas cannot be applied to everything, which they do. “Racist roads” is not an entirely wrong way to describe highways built through “blighted” neighborhoods. However, I doubt the same people who did it in the first place are going to be able to fix it. In a similar vein (vane? vain?), “privilege” is indeed a thing. I’ll even entertain the idea that “white privilege” is a thing. However, it’s not the only force in our society.
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Mostly the only white privilege in my field? Stupid editor never told a white person who wasn’t of an interesting sexuality he/she should ONLY write stories of his/her “struggles.” For people like me though? Ah yup. No spaceships, no dragons. to be authentic we must write about “struggle.”
Gags.
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Sod that with a rusty metal pinecone. “Struggle.” Pfah. Darker-than-porcelain and inky black hair doth not an Indian brave make, nor a Turk, nor an ‘African.’ Do they want to hear the struggles of the construction worker turned trucker that had to quit due to work related injury? Or the former soldier that can’t sleep in the same bed as his wife because he might hurt her in his night terror plagued sleep? Or the plumber that works all the hours the clock has to support aging parents and fatherless children, growing aged in body if not time far sooner than he ought?
Nah, thought not.
Their ‘stories’ are pale imitations of the real, childishly simple for minds uncluttered by the possibility of being ever wrong about any little thing.
I want my SFF to be BIG. Ambitious, curious, risk taking, and consequence surviving. Science fiction in particular requires a functioning brain. You have to follow the what-ifs to get to the spaceships, hyperdrives, other worlds, and alien races. You need these things, along with the tropes, to make the setting come alive.
Cookie cutter plots and cellophane thin villains aren’t necessarily bad things. Saturday morning cartoons can get away with a lot, and some of the stuff I started out writing and reading (horror, noir) weren’t ever going to be accused of having too much depth.
But pitching a story with too much leveraging on the frail limbs of current issue politics- even current issue politics I like– is a recipe for a quickly forgotten scribbled missive.
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The Survival Podcast had an interesting interview with a guy from that group a while back, worth looking up if you like podcasts.
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Government solutions are like the old woman who swallowed a fly. It just gets worse the more they try to fix things.
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Strong Towns is pretty much one note after a while. Good ideas in some cases (“stroads”, which are completely unwalkable thoroughfares, are indeed the worst), but it often circles back around to stack-a-prole because “we can’t afford street maintenance in suburbs.”
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“…regulations trying to shape them into someone’s idea of paradise.”
I’d respectfully note (which you already know, but needs emphasizing) that this applies not only to communities but to every single thing touched by leftists, academics and bureaucrats everywhere. They simply cannot stand for anyone to make decisions of their own.
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Like the three states in Germany desperately working to keep people from voting for parties that the Left disagrees with. “Heaven forbid (if Heaven exists, which of course it does not) that the people be allowed to choose for themselves.”
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That’s pretty much what the Michigan legislature has done very recently… made certain that if the riff-raff insist on voting for people they don’t like, they can still “adjust” the reported vote-count to be more in-line with what It Should Be, according to them.
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Reminds me of once more coming across the endless internet bitching about America’s lack of high speed passenger rail compared to Europe and how any resistance to the 15 minute city scheme was just a bunch of backwards hicks not knowing what was good for them. One angry liberal declared that “the people want walkable cities and are sick of cookie-cutter suburban housing!” Uh no, you want those things, at least you imagine you do, judging by the popular continuation of suburbs and highways most of us are quite happy with car culture.
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It’s amazing how “the people” seem to keep picking the “cookie cutter” options….
Driving through Waukee– a Des Moines suburb– there’s a lot of apartment complexes being put in…but they look like suburban developments. You have to look kind of close to see that they’re not McMansions, and it’s mostly the parking that does so.
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Not only a lot of high end apartments, but condos too. Hard to tell sometimes what the parking situation is. Niece is now in an apartment that uses parking storage. Arrive to parking area, input code and garage wanted, garage arrives, have X amount of time to remove or drive in vehicle in garage, leave. Don’t know if access to vehicle in garage where it is stored is possible or not. Don’t know how one would load or unload lots of stuff, groceries, or if going somewhere else to stay. She’s in Portland, if it matters.
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Deny us safe free parking and businesses will die. Recently someone got greedy. A local long time *restaurant went out of business. New one moved in (eventually) and parking was must use app to sign in to pay for parking after an hour. $2/hour + $1 processing fee. Nextdoor went ballistic. Now it is back to original setup, 3 hours free, enough time to get seated, order, and eat. The downtown county area parking requires using machines, not apps. Street meters still take coins, but also debit and credit these days (we keep quarters in the vehicles JIC). I think we go downtown once or twice every couple of years. Know about the county parking because we had to go to the county sheriff’s office to turn in our CCL applications. Don’t know what we’ll do if we ever actually have to go in for trial selection (so far it has been “call on this date”, then when call in it is “no trials scheduled”).
(* Electric station for those who know Eugene. Right in front of Amtrak Eugene station. Most the dining rooms are old train dining cars.)
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That’s where we went for our wedding day dinner (wedding mid-morning/early afternoonish and with church lady potluck for food. One relative told us to snag their card off the gift table and use the cash for a “fancy” meal.)
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Was really sorry to see Electric Station go. Didn’t go often, expensive. Now it is the “Old Spaghetti Factory”. Been once for a luncheon meeting. Not something we will go to now, unless some sort of meeting (not that it is “bad”, just it is something we too easily make ourselves for a lot less, and just as good). Too bad. The train cars are unique for dining experience.
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We had more than a few anniversary dinners there before the arrival of the baby. Also was a regular meeting location for a club both mom & I go to (until closed). Plus a regular Schwab financial dinner seminar location.
Definitely the place for wedding day dinner.
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Which is why the government f*ks up everything it touches. They just can’t stand to see people getting along without their ‘help’.
Why, people might even get the notion that they don’t need the government to do every little thing for them. Where would they be then?
———————————
“We know we’re not smart enough to micro-manage the lives of three hundred and twenty million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”
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Sarah’s descriptions of killing the culture of a neighborhood remind me of Call the Midwife and the city evicting people from their, rather squalid, homes so that new high rises can be put up.
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I have literally read a review of a Thomas Sowell book where the reviewer said she couldn’t imagine that the tenants who were violently evicted from “substandard” housing weren’t better off for it.
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Sometimes those Pore Oppressed Minority Group Members subtly mock their Bwana “Betters.” A “ice breaker” exercises for my online courses at UT San Antonio was for students to show everyone their favorite cheapy snack recipes. Image my shock (and delight) when one of my Tex-Mex students contributed his recipe for “Ghetto Dogs,” hot dogs wrapped in corn tortillas and deep-fried. What a totally stupid, subversive, and surprisingly tasty snack.
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Ghettos I don’t think have to just be neighborhoods. I’m reminded of the Indian Reservations, and the subsequent South African ghettos, that are sometimes larger than entire east coast states. We forced the natives onto reservations through treaties as we moved west, then made the reservations ever smaller. Trying to keep an identity as a nation on the reservation usually means low income, poor schooling, horrid health care, limited economic opportunities, and early death. Those who cut ties to the reservation have a good chance at fitting in with the dominate culture and doing well for themselves and their families. Those that try to have one foot in each world tend to end up stuck in neither and become a part of the social services community. I’ve seen a couple of reservations try to turn their fortunes around, but it’s a slow process and doesn’t always work well.
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We forced the natives onto reservations through treaties as we moved west, then made the reservations ever smaller
They didn’t exactly help themselves that way when they sold reservation land to non-tribe-members, and then sued to get it back once it had been improved. Running casinos is a much better way for them to make money.
Someone should have introduced them to the concept of the “99-year lease”.
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Nor the whole “make treaties, insist that young men who go out raiding don’t count as part of the tribe, accept stuff they bring back from the raids” dance.
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Tribal culture makes a huge difference. The Navajo, Hopi, and Cherokee went a very different direction from the Dakota/Lakota and some of the Ojibwa, for example. And tribal in-fighting doesn’t help, most of the time. Southern Cheyenne and Comanche tribal politics… My score card needed a score card.
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Never, ever get involved in tribal politics if you can help it. Great gran had stories.
Every little thing I’ve heard of, seen, or experienced myself upholds her contempt for tribal politics in spades. We ain’t on the rolls, and by Himself’s grace, never will be.
Even the better ones have… issues.
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Our beloved son in law is a member of a Lakota tribe. The stories of tribal politics we hear from him are fairly hair raising. His folks moved the family from the rez while he was very young to get away from the toxic parts of culture. But many of his family still live there and are trying to turn it around. More wonderful down to earth people you will never meet.
They are having as easy time of that as the rest of the country is dealing with Federal corruption.
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Man, the Cherokee have about as horrible a culture stomp in their history as you can imagine. I wonder if there are substantial cultural differences between the Western branch (Oklahoma) and the Eastern branch (who somehow managed to duck the Trail of Tears.)
I have a couple of friends who are registered Cherokee, but as you can probably guess, they are not from the reservation.
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There are quite substantial differences. More than that gets into territory I wasn’t there to report, so would be be third hand at best.
The ones what somehow managed to duck the Trail of Tears is family history, more or less. They were taken in, much as the mixed race and ex slaves were, and the mountains swallowed them up as far as any official knows.
Back when, there were quite a few folks who couldn’t own land on paper, but were the de facto landholders in truth. Time and again there would be family that could pass as white that made the trip to the courthouse to pay the taxes and whatnot. Didn’t matter much to those involved, save a generational and deep seated mistrust of any and all governmental entities.
They’d migrate from house to house sometimes, staying ahead of the law. My great great gran’s back porch hosted more than a few like that. The Appalachians back in the day were a place a man could hide in all his life (or all the life of his pursuers, as it were).
You had to be pretty damned useless in order to starve. Water’s plentiful, as creeks and springs abound in the hills. Game is easy to come by in most all seasons. If you’re smart enough to hide the smoke from your fire, nobody would know you were around for miles.
As for the rez, ain’t many to be found there that I’d willingly call kinfolk. They made their choices, same as my ancestors did. We got along just fine, thank you very much, for the most part. Still have issues with alcohol, but so long as my kin can steer clear, we usually do okay.
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There’s a state park historic mansion in Georgia that belonged to my friends’ paternal ancestor. Too visible to fade into the hills; their branch of the family got sent to Oklahoma.
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Yeah urban planners destroy neighborhoods on purpose. After the Detroit riots (Which were actually hundreds all over the country but there was no internet and TV only showed Detroit.) Akron Ohio where I was living decided they must have a new expressway that ran parallel to another expressway to downtown. It just HAPPENED to wipe out Howard street that was one small black business, home, or church after another. It had one of the few hotels blacks could use between NYC and Detroit/Chicago. National entertainers came and worked there. Now years later they are tearing it down because it was never really needed or fully finished. It served its purpose.
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Read the chapter of P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Wh-res called “Poverty Policy: How to Endow Privation.”
That’s what the projects and urban renewal exchanged for the ghetto.
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A beautiful example of “things we’ve forgotten about” is Mutual Aid Societies.
This WAS, until the Great Depression, how most people functioned and lived without the Modern Welfare State.
American Heritage did a wonderful piece on it some years ago, and it’s well worth the read…
It’s the answer to the modern liberal question, “Well, if the government doesn’t do it, who will?” when it comes to social welfare.
Mutual Aid Societies provided a great deal of the social welfare the society needed, in a much more effective and efficient manner — but they were overwhelmed by the financial catastrophe that was the government-caused Great Depression.
From Mutual Aid to Welfare State: How Fraternal Societies Fought Poverty and Taught Character
https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/mutual-aid-welfare-state-how-fraternal-societies-fought-poverty-and-taught
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They were not the only ones: https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/how-mother-cabrini-saved-america-5605038?src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign
*Mother Cabrini, then, came along at a time when Rome was ever more interested in building out civic institutions, particularly as they pertained to Catholic migrants who were spreading out the world over. It was a time when urbanization and industry was taking over from rural and agricultural life and when the needs of education and health were dramatically expanding to cover the demands of a vastly expanding population.
Cabrini’s order came to New York City when it was a growing city but not the biggest. This was before the skyscrapers dominated the skyline and when corruption of the most egregious sort afflicted local politics. Mother Cabrini, who forever felt herself in a passionate rush to complete her mission due to her persistent ill-health, learned the system well, and eventually became flooded with the cash necessary to expand her operations.
The result was a model for the world, a vast network of charitable institutions run entirely off voluntary donations and administered by highly competent women who had committed their lives to serving the Christian faith. America, with its surplus wealth provided by expanding industry, proved that it was possible to be both capitalistic in its economic system but also fund a huge sector of education, health, and social services run by ideals and not some top-down system of socialism.*
The article has more. I want what he describes back, and I want the mutual aid societies back. They have to be better than what we have now!
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Y’all had an outdoor bathroom. We were just happy the outhouse was downwind most of the time. Heh.
But, true enough, it was a sight better than things could’ve been. Modern plumbing is quite possibly the very last convenience I could be forced to give up. Internet? Can do. It’d suck not visiting with far flung friends this way, but possible. Electricity? Same. Been there, done that growing up and several times since. Cars? My legs still work.
But indoor, heated, potable water? Brothers and sisters let me tell you that this is absolutely essential to my continued comfort, health, and general well being. No hauling water from the pump. No running to the well if and when the pump breaks. No busting ice to hand wash clothes on the scrubbing board. No boiling water to eat and drink with every damn day. No staying dirty to save water for a few days.
I don’t wish the past on anyone whose grown up in the last thirty years. Yes, looking back, it sucked compared to now. It wasn’t much different from the century or three before, but it was a little better in a bunch of little ways. Things really seemed to pick up steam in the world in the 1900s. Not so much in our little corner of existence, but eh, we managed.
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Haven’t been in the house in decades (since great-aunt went to live with her son after great-uncle died, 1973). But their house part of the original homestead. House built by one of the children who came on the wagon train in 1843. It still had the original well hand pump in the kitchen, with modern plumbing. Power went out. No problem. Still had the hand pump. Also had a wood cook stove sitting in the kitchen next to the electric range. Heating was by wood heat by a wood furnace in the basement. Also had a huge wood fireplace in the family room/dining room. Also had an old oak phone next to a modern rotary, but the oak one was pulled when the property sold (aunt has it).
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the reason I don’t camp. No. I want to have my bathroom and SHOWER.
And I did say my family was “well off.” One of three in the village (five if you count grandma’s tenants) who had BATHROOMS. The others had them inside, but that’s just quibbling.
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grin My great granda was the richest man in five counties for a bit. Sold moonshine during the Prohibition, and kept a steady stream of custom for decades after.
For me though, I had no notion of any poverty as a semi-feral child. Aside from chores and helping with a bit of farmwork, I roamed the woods and got up to all sorts of shenanigans that would see my folks crucified in this day and age for willful neglect. Still cleaned up for church and hid my bandaids under a starched white button up and put my money in the offering plate, as one does.
Bathroom was built in the house before the addition, back in the early 90s I think. Might’ve been late 80s. Dad did all the construction himself. I just ferried nails and stuff to him.
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We’d have got along, I think, as children.
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It’s funny, but campgrounds are more likely to have showers these days than proper toilets.
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Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22819476-june-2024—a-work-featuring-a-married-couple-in-a-major-role
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Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I seriously doubt the idea that any of those government twats really want to help anyone. They want communities smashed because rootless people are easier to manipulate and milk cash from. People growing gardens and selling amongst each other means their friends in Big Ag and processed food megacorps might have a few less dollars at the end of the day. Healthy communities with aunts and grandparents watching kids means fewer tax dollar generating butts in seats at the public school and means they need to work harder to brainwash them later. Happier and healthier people don’t need Big Pharma or the medical industrial complex as frequently, and so on. When literally everything they do results in grift and corruption, it’s hard to believe that it isn’t the goal to start with.
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Leaving without comment.
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2024/05/16/nih-official-says-he-knows-how-to-make-emails-disappear-after-a-foia-request-n2396319
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It’s a shame there are not more thumbs and hearts to upvote this.
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“But then in my ideal world, the government leaves the people alone, except for guarding the borders and minding the highways.”
Yes. Whenever you see something f-ed, like a ghetto or even a messed-up highway, when you go digging just a little bit you find there is a government making it be that way. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes as an unintended consequence of something else.
Looking at the abject disorder of Toronto, for example, we have drug-addicted bums crapping on Yonge St. and tenting under the Gardiner Expressway and in city parks. This is not an accident or a mistake, this is DIRECT ACTION by government. They’re doing it deliberately, under cover of clouds of Leftist squid ink. It isn’t a mistake or an unintended consequence. This disorder is what they wanted.
My deep dive into gun control in the 1990s revealed that almost everything about crime is A) being lied about by government and B) has nothing to do with guns. Specifically, most statistics you see report state-level averages, sometimes the national average. They even compare averages from countries internationally.
This is a lie. Because the average pretends that the crimes are spread evenly across the city, the state or the nation. The -truth- is that the crimes are pretty much all committed in very well delineated neighborhoods of certain cities. Chicago is a great example, some very small areas in the crappy part of town are open-air drug markets and basically free-fire zones. This block gets ALL the shootings. Next block over, zero shootings. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s how it is.
But you never find this out unless you plot the crimes BY LOCATION. And when you do that, you can instantly see that the situation is not one of generalized lawlessness, but rather it is an ARRANGEMENT between the criminals and the government. This block, free-fire zone. The next block, pull out a gun and the cops will kill you.
Next question, how the F- have they managed to cover that up all this time? Elvis Presley singing “In the Ghetto.” “To Sir With Love”, the movie. “Blackboard Jungle” the movie. “Straw Dogs” the movie. Every friggin’ Dirty Harry movie. “Bullitt.” And etc.
It’s a scam. We’ve been scammed on this thing since WWII ended. All bullsh1t from one end to the other.
Pretty fun, right? >:(
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don’t forget the curse that is rent control. In NYC before rent control, landlords offered incentives to renters because there was too much supply. After rent control and the70’s inflation the landlords couldn’t afford to maintain the buildings so they got run down and collapsed. The government owned projects were never maintained. Add to that Robert Moses shattering established neighborhoods to build highways and it all starts to make sense. Government is the problem
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The house I did most of my growing up in only had running water in the kitchen, when we bought it. The elderly lady who had owned it LIKED it that way. Two outhouses; one two holer behind the house, and a one holer in the barn. My Mom promptly engaged in an incentive program to encourage my father to complete the promised indoor bathroom. So we had a bit under a year to get used to the original conditions.
BUT. For several years I had a Portuguese penpal. So when I was in the Navy and had the opportunity to visit her, I took it. And on the day I arrived, she was heading to visit her ailing grandmother in the ancestral home in a quite rural area. She asked if I would mind going along, and I was very honored to have the opportunity. And to me, it felt like ‘going home’. The whole area was rather more ‘primitive’ than the area I grew up in, but the people were much the same. The one old tractor, the horses, the houses that made our 200+ year old farmhouse look new; it was WONDERFUL! And enough people spoke enough English that I was able to converse in a reasonable manner. (There were a lot of Amish where I grew up [and where I live now!] so Germans could get by, but Portuguese with no English would have far more trouble than I had!) Having to go back to her city apartment at the end of the day was actually sort of depressing. It was so drab in comparison! Still and all, it was a two day immersion in a different culture that I completely enjoyed. However, the penpal got engaged soon after that, and the fellow did not like the idea of his fiancé writing to some strange guy who had actually come to visit the country! And it is now so long ago, I have forgotten her name, but shall never forget being crammed into the tiny bedroom to be introduced to her grandmother, or the small neat fields with industrious people working them, and the earnest young people who were so willing to explain it all to me as well as they could.
I can reassure any doubters that you do come from a lovely, wonderful country where other wonderful people live. Yes, the government certainly had it’s problems, as we are living through here and now, but the PEOPLE were good and kind and and welcoming.
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Commenting on Phantom’s post that mentioned Chicago;
When I was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station for training, I was mostly afraid of ALL of Chicago. Most of what I had heard was negative, of the poor AND rich neighborhoods. But a fellow in one of my classes was from the north side, and we had been to church together, and he invited me down to visit his home on a weekend. TOTALLY different experience. Lovely neighborhood, friendly people who weren’t TOO hard on me for having practically no Spanish, and a positive memorable time. My unplanned, involuntary visit to a south Chicago area was quite the antithesis. Though in the end, a different friend and I got out OK, and we apparently provided the fellow with the very large gun a good laugh.
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