Quote Originally Posted by Detroitnerd View Post
When problems are insoluble, critics can rightfully point out that the situation is all effed up from top to bottom and maybe the system that created it and tolerates it is rotten to the core.

And then we often hear the clarion call of the Cult of Hope: "The fellow condemns without offering anything better. Why tear down without building up?"

Well, because sometimes the realities are so grim and the problem itself so impossible to resolve that anybody speaking uplift should probably be heckled, if not tarred, feathers and run out of town on a rail.

There's not enough money coming in to fund a city and bond obligations and pension obligations. There's probably only enough money to pay the bondholders and fuck all else. I don't see any solution in there; do you? No, it's a huge problem that was created by all of the powerful people in the state of Michigan making shitty, short-term political judgments, with outstate forces chortling that a Day of Reckoning would come and local cretins whistling past the graveyard night after night.

It's our pile of crap. Why sprinkle sugar on it or tie it in a scarlet ribbon? Who is really fooled by this uplift?

"The trouble with [an honest critic] is that he tells the truth, which is the unsafest of all things to tell. His crime is that he is a man who prefers facts to illusions, and knows what he is talking about. Such men are never popular. The public taste is for merchandise of a precisely opposite character. The way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true, but what is merely comforting. This is what is called building up. This is constructive criticism." --H.L. Mencken
Meh, something's got to give. A simple "It's too fucked to fix" isn't going to work - and no, I do not believe it's too big of a problem to solve. It's not about sprinkling sugar on the pile of crap, it's about scraping the pile of crap off the city. All I've mostly seen is people complaining about the fact that the pile of crap exists and freaking out on anyone that tries to do anything about it.

Well, that's what I see from the older folks. I don't see that around the 35-and-under crowd. We have the luxury of not having the historical baggage.