WSU Math Instructor Shot in Woodbridge

[Zacha341]

Yeah, the scrapping culture would be as durable as roaches! ------

LOL, nice!

How long until it would cool enough that we could scrap it all, then?

[Det_ard]

Bingo , English you hit the nail on the head. I think you are seeing the beginning stages of what effects a declining middle class will have on a city like Detroit.
With a real unemployment rate of around 50% for residents of Detroit proper, you will have the poor, the working poor [[used to be middle class), and relatively well off [[few truly rich will live in Detroit proper). You will see more private security patrols in the better areas of the city. How well you do under this type of environment will have more to do with how much and what kind of education you have rather than how hard you are willing to physically work.

People will be able to run and hide from this as long as they can have private security, gated communities, and shop in the burbs. In other words the less contact with the underclass the better.

The good part is that these things like most things in life goes thru cycles. It took around 30 years of laissez-faire economic policies to get to this. It may take another 30 to see some balance again. I doubt if I will see it, hopefully you will.

It struck me as funny that, while you think English "hit the nail on the head" with her post, she didn't mention education as an option. She proposed a) more no/low-skill jobs, b) institutionalization, and c) something she feared to speak and would fight to the death.

What does it say when a PhD'ed educator in Detroit doesn't even consider education to be an option for Detroit's problematic residents?

[firstandten]

It struck me as funny that, while you think English "hit the nail on the head" with her post, she didn't mention education as an option. She proposed a) more no/low-skill jobs, b) institutionalization, and c) something she feared to speak and would fight to the death.

What does it say when a PhD'ed educator in Detroit doesn't even consider education to be an option for Detroit's problematic residents?

Knowing a little bit of her posting history and content I made an assumption [[Oh no! there I go again) that education was part of the options

[townonenorth]

Knowing a little bit of her posting history and content I made an assumption [[Oh no! there I go again) that education was part of the options

Yes, I thought the same thing when I saw that post. I mean, sure there always should be some kind of work for the less educated, but to infer that somehow the people of Detroit are an underclass of some sort just smacks of elitism.

[mwilbert]

but to infer that somehow the people of Detroit are an underclass of some sort just smacks of elitism

If by the "people of Detroit" one means everyone in Detroit, then no, that is not an underclass; Detroit is far from homogeneous. But there is a reason Detroit is the poorest and arguably most dangerous major city in the US, and it isn't because of its well-educated, highly-skilled residents and their vast reservoirs of social capital. Uneducated, unskilled, and badly-connected people are the very definition of the underclass, and I don't see what is elitist about noticing that there are a lot of them in the city, nor why we shouldn't think about how they could be better integrated into mainstream society.

[English]

I was referring specifically to the criminal underclass in Detroit with high recidivism rates. I should have made myself more clear, but the topic wasn't just poor people in general. This thread began with our talk about the WSU math lecturer who was shot, not with a general discussion of poor people in Detroit. Since I'm a black Detroiter whose paternal roots are in this criminal underclass, I can speak about this without malice. My dad was the only one of his brothers without an extensive criminal record. I love my uncles, but I know exactly what I am talking about. When you are part of something for so long, it becomes a way of life. Some of these folks in this group can be integrated into mainstream society, but for many, it is an uphill battle. You are challenging their basic assumptions about what it means to be in this world... and if they do not want to change, do not trust those calling for their change, do not see any benefit to changing, or do not think it is possible, then it will not happen.

I wish that some of you could come hear my dear friend and spiritual mentor speak to my class at Wayne State. She has been a prison guard for over 20 years, and is a licensed clinical social worker. She's begun to go on the speaking circuit with the blessing of her supervisors. She'd vouch for everything that I've said -- these folks [[mostly guys) feel disconnected from society, have felt that way since they were small children, and have had no one to tell them they are, in fact, human. They believe that they are the monsters and the animals that we say they are, so her lifework has been to engage in the process of humanization through what she does in her block.

So yes, individual agency, and people inherently knowing right from wrong, good from bad, can be discussed. But where on earth are these folks supposed to learn these values? I love school; I've dedicated my career and spent my retirement to work on education issues. But education isn't everything.

We must figure out a plan for work that doesn't require college degrees. There are too many people with college degrees now. We have tried the progressive experiment of college for all, and it has failed. My folks were skilled laborers who learned trades, and they were more financially secure than I am with a doctorate that I'll be paying for forever. Nationally, we have a generation of people with master's degrees and PhDs who cannot find work, as the Chronicle of Higher Education website and many others attest. The problem is that middle class kids in their 20s are hiding out in college and grad school hoping that the economy will eventually recover. So it takes a BA to cashier at Target, an MS to pour coffee at Starbucks, and a PhD to clerk at Borders. Even those in the STEM fields who are graduating right now are having trouble finding the kind of work that was readily available 5-10 years ago.

A solid K-12 education with several options for postsecondary work would serve us well. We also need to rethink "the high price of discount culture" to quote the book *Cheap*, and return to valuing quality, locally made goods. We're seeing that in the nascent, microfinanced ventures in the city. These places should be nurtured, because they are precious.

[runnerXT]

Canada and all the Great Lakes states would beg to differ, along with an increasingly thirsty Western U.S.

Look, something has to give when it comes to the underclass, not just in Detroit, but nationwide. Either we need to find a way to increase the number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that pay a living wage, institutionalize them, or resort to more frightening measures that other human societies have chosen [[and that I will fight against until my last breath). There are no other options. We can't continue to do this laissez-faire crap and expect civilization as we know it to continue. How far are we willing to run and hide from those who have been completely dehumanized, and value neither their lives nor yours?

what I don't understand is why American cities have violent crime rates equal to the worst of the third world. You ever been to a third world country? Now that's poverty. No DPS, no Wayne State, no food stamps, no heat assistance, no housing assistance and so on. Why is it that many of these truly poor countries murder each other less than the citizens of American cities do? I just don't get it. Look at SW Detroit. The Mexican immigrants who are poor created their own economies, retail, services and on. What's going on here? Come on born and raised Americans.

[English]

My last point thoroughly explains the mindset. The argument "immigrants did it -- why can't you" is usually answered by those in question with "well, of course we can't, 'cause ____s ain't sh-t." Again and again, they don't think that they can do it, because they do not believe they are human. They believe that they are the monsters and criminals that everyone says they are.

The argument that "well, at least you aren't living in Third World poverty" doesn't hold water either. If you think that you are a monster and a criminal, do you really think that the most logical thing to do is to work hard in school and go to Wayne State? If you have untreated mental illness, does the presence of new hotels, casinos, and stadia make any difference?

Also, inequality breeds contempt. In many of those countries mentioned, there is uniform poverty, or there are structural explanations within the culture for social stratification. In the United States, there are none -- if you are poor and uneducated, you suck because this great nation is a meritocracy with freedom and equality where everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources, and everyone begins at the same starting line.

I agree that individual actors are culpable for the crimes that they commit, and ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But if everyone and everything around you reinforces the message that you're poor, you're dumb, you suck, you're a monster, and you're an animal, and that the only way that you'll get any modicum of respect is if you're feared and can "handle your business in the streets", then only rare individuals will transcend those messages that absolutely everything in our society reinforces.

[runnerXT]

Honestly I don't know. I am not a right wing person at all, furthest from it. And truthfully, I am willing to learn, but what you said it sounds like excuses. I am not trying to be insulting or demeaning, just saying how I reacted to your statement. Just being honest.

In my previous post I was not saying well at least you aren't living in Third World poverty, I would argue the haves in those societies are much more extreme in money and attitude than here in America anyway.

I would argue it is the more intact family unit as opposed to the 'message' society gives. Doesn’t society give the same message, possibly more harshly, to Illegal’s and their now Legal children, from Mexico, etc.?

I do have to say it is hard to sympathize when you see uneducated immigrants make it so to speak and create their own economies. I also find it hard to sympathize when the much poorer in third world countries are so less violent than American City’s poor citizens.

I cannot, again being honest, fathom why crime is so high here and is lower in much poorer countries than American cities.

[English]

Well, I am just explaining what they think. You, like many, deem it to be excuse making. But I'd daresay that any rationale that they give would be deemed to be excuse making, simply because I know [[not just believe) that we really don't believe these folks are people -- even before they commit their crimes. We expect these folks to commit crimes even after they graduate from high school and college, gain employment, and walk around wearing three-piece suits. Even in corporate America, they are suspects. Insanely, we even also require those who make it out of a crime-ridden environment and succeed to go save everyone who's left behind in it.

Some people don't want to hear their perspectives; they just want the criminal underclass to stop committing crimes and to become law-abiding, taxpaying, upstanding members of society when there is no real incentive for them to do so. Then they don't understand why their wanting and wishing and ranting doesn't change anything. It's incredibly odd.

So once again, we are left with three choices:

a) Provide alternatives to crime and resources to re-incorporate them into society [[carrot),

b) Lock them up [[stick), or

c) Rid society of them completely [[which has been joked about around this metro region since I was a small child, and which I will fight against).

[Magnatomicflux]

I cannot, again being honest, fathom why crime is so high here and is lower in much poorer countries than American cities.

Eating. Eating is probably a priority over breaking into someones home constructed of sheet metal and sticks. That and money doesn't rule their lives. Plus, I don't know what there is to steal when everyone has the same amount of nothing. Those that do have a little, are the ones that come into town with AK-47's, raping mothers and daughters, and killing fathers and sons. But still....compared to almost anytown USA, even they have nothing.

[Augustiner]

Doesn’t society give the same message, possibly more harshly, to Illegal’s and their now Legal children, from Mexico, etc.?

I'm not going to comment on which group is sent the harsher message, but whatever makes you think Hispanic immigrants and their descendants, documented and otherwise, aren't affected by the negative stereotypes they face?

[runnerXT]

I'm not going to comment on which group is sent the harsher message, but whatever makes you think Hispanic immigrants and their descendants, documented and otherwise, aren't affected by the negative stereotypes they face?

Oh sure they are and that was my point. Look at SW Detroit and compare.



Gay people are properly the most marginalized group of people in America. We even get to vote what rights they can't have Today. Look at the depression and suicide rates of gay youth. Drugs and alcohol a problem with the gay population? Yup! Being marginalized daily is the norm from Politicians speaking to being beaten up and yelled at by the general public. How is Ferndale doing?

I just don't think anything can be done, from the outside, with America's inner cities. It has to come from within.
America has become much more than a Black/White society aside from SE Michigan and a few other places of major cities. That is its future no norm. From Asian, who are racially harassed, to Latino, who are also harassed, to whatever race/nationality/lifestyle are harassed. What is interesting, when I say racially harassed I am not just talking about the white man being the harasser to the ‘outsiders’ because everyone in America is becoming an outsider. There will be no majority soon.

[Zacha341]

Thank you for such a insightful post Eng. I am going to PM you re. some details.

I was referring specifically to the criminal underclass in Detroit with high recidivism rates. I should have made myself more clear, but the topic wasn't just poor people in general. This thread began with our talk about the WSU math lecturer who was shot, not with a general discussion of poor people in Detroit. Since I'm a black Detroiter whose paternal roots are in this criminal underclass, I can speak about this without malice. My dad was the only one of his brothers without an extensive criminal record. I love my uncles, but I know exactly what I am talking about. When you are part of something for so long, it becomes a way of life. Some of these folks in this group can be integrated into mainstream society, but for many, it is an uphill battle. You are challenging their basic assumptions about what it means to be in this world...

[Augustiner]

Oh sure they are and that was my point. Look at SW Detroit and compare.

I'm looking, and comparing, and I don't see your point.

[Pingu]

Well, taken on its own, this thread will never "add up," having been reduced to discontinuity & senselessness by numerous deletions.
Doesn't seem like a forum, more like a wall where some graffiti remains and some is painted over.

Look at it this way, buddy, you saw it coming, a precision air strike. Suicide by napalm. Dooblah-Vay Dude made an ash of himself.

[hamtown mike]

Naturally something will have to give. ... or get out of Dodge altogether.

I think you answered the question regarding what will give... the people. Anyone who can, will get out of Dodge, while the holdouts will either arm themselves or continue to get picked off. [[mugged/robbed/shot)

What's your breaking point? My home has been invaded 3 times. As a result I intentionally avoid having nice things. It actually costs me more to repair the windows and broken door jambs than any material loss- I should just leave my doors unlocked. I Haven't painted the outside of my house in an effort to give the appearance of "poverty." What was once idealistic deliberate urban living has become my little slice of prison.

Seriously a man was beaten and burned alive, bodies pop up everywhere, a man was murdered over his motorcycle jacket, the guy buying a tv was shot in the head, this professor and on and on and on. How do you make life more valuable? Or, how do you make crime not pay?

The solution? You don't try to rehabilitate cockroaches, jobs-train bed bugs or subsidize a rat's housing. When dealing with vermin, the first thing you do is cut off the food supply.

How about this... If you didn't pay any taxes [[property or income) in the previous year, you don't get to vote. And if you paid taxes in a city [[even if you don't live there) you can vote with a special 3/5th's city ballot. Sadly, in Detroit, the majority is controlling what is being contributed by the minority. Detroit needs to hear from and represent those with a vested interest in the city.

[hamtown mike]

In many of those countries mentioned, there is uniform poverty, or there are structural explanations within the culture for social stratification. In the United States, there are none .

Therefore, if you are poor in the U.S. you have nobody to blame but yourself?

[English]

Therefore, if you are poor in the U.S. you have nobody to blame but yourself?

Many of our fellow Americans feel that way.

[English]

I think you answered the question regarding what will give... the people. Anyone who can, will get out of Dodge, while the holdouts will either arm themselves or continue to get picked off. [[mugged/robbed/shot)

What's your breaking point? My home has been invaded 3 times. As a result I intentionally avoid having nice things. It actually costs me more to repair the windows and broken door jambs than any material loss- I should just leave my doors unlocked. I Haven't painted the outside of my house in an effort to give the appearance of "poverty." What was once idealistic deliberate urban living has become my little slice of prison.

Seriously a man was beaten and burned alive, bodies pop up everywhere, a man was murdered over his motorcycle jacket, the guy buying a tv was shot in the head, this professor and on and on and on. How do you make life more valuable? Or, how do you make crime not pay?

The solution? You don't try to rehabilitate cockroaches, jobs-train bed bugs or subsidize a rat's housing. When dealing with vermin, the first thing you do is cut off the food supply.

How about this... If you didn't pay any taxes [[property or income) in the previous year, you don't get to vote. And if you paid taxes in a city [[even if you don't live there) you can vote with a special 3/5th's city ballot. Sadly, in Detroit, the majority is controlling what is being contributed by the minority. Detroit needs to hear from and represent those with a vested interest in the city.

Hamtown Mike, I'm so sorry that you're under siege right now. My mom and grandmother got out in the mid-00s, just before the crash. I can't believe what's happened just over the past 5 years since I chose to go back to school.

What will happen if we "cut off the food supply" is that those "in the life" will come outside of the city and do whatever they have to elsewhere. We are already seeing that at Eastland, in inner-ring suburbs, and in places like Ann Arbor, where my neighborhood had 4 armed robberies within a two week period last fall.

When I was in middle school in the late 1980s, an older white suburbanite wrote the first letter to the editor that ever stirred my racial, ethnic, and class consciousness. I remember that she said we needed to build a barbed fence around Detroit to protect good and decent people from the rotting cancer within. I was shocked and I cried. I had no idea that there were still people who felt that way about people. I realized then that there was nothing I could do as a 12 year old to convince this woman that I wasn't a filthy criminal. Then came the book Devil's Night, the Primetime Live special, etc. By high school, I was convinced that white suburbia considered me to be a parasite, and there was nothing I could do to change their minds, so I disdained them right back. It has taken many, many years and some wonderful people to lessen my anger -- but I am sure that it will never, ever completely be eliminated from my consciousness. I pray that I live to see future generations for whom racial issues are a historical instead of a contemporary fact.

I disagreed with the letter writer back then, and life experience has made me even more passionate in my disagreement. We cannot build a fence around people who feel dehumanized and expect to contain them. That policy didn't work in the 1960s and 1970s when we let the core neighborhoods go, and it didn't work in the 1980s and 1990s when we let the outer ring of the city go. The inner-ring suburbs are next, and if we continue the status quo, in 50 years, there will be absolutely nowhere for your grandchildren to run in order to escape poverty, hopeless, and everything that comes along with that.

There was an excellent novel by the late Octavia Butler, written about the United States of the mid-2020s. The upper middle class lives under siege in gated communities, and can only leave in heavily armed caravans. Occasionally, the "monstrous" underclass breaches a wall, and the results are dystopian. I read it in the mid-1990s and was frightened out of my wits. Today, I'm much more resigned to it. We are looking at our future unless and until something gives.

And unless we are committed to working towards another world, you or I or any of us on this thread could very well be the next victim of a violent crime. We cannot, cannot go on this way.

[JStone]

"What was once idealistic deliberate urban living has become my little slice of prison" - Great post hamtown mike.

[hogz]

What are the cops doing around here? Detroit police seem terrible at their jobs. Should there be some sort of re-structuring of the detroit police department like Ford, Gm and DPS? Taxpayers don't seem to be getting very much safety in return for their money. I bet a private company employing detroit residents would be a better jo

[Sparky]

"What was once idealistic deliberate urban living has become my little slice of prison" - Great post hamtown mike.

I feel the same way as hamtown mike. You said it perfectly and in so few words.

I moved here to Corktown thinking that things would get "better" and that I could be a part of making things "better," whatever that means. Things haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse and I am stuck here. Nobody will buy my house for what I owe [[hell, I wouldn't buy my house for half of what I owe). So here I sit and wait, watching the city further crumble around me and we haven't even hit bottom yet.

[Gianni]

I'm not sure who said there is less crime in third world countries but you must be kidding. Even in Costa Rica, the "switzerland" of Central America, if you go to rent a car at Avis in the city [[not the airport) they have armed guards packing heat. In Italy, not a third world country by any means, you cannot walk into a bank without going through a metal detector first. The crime stats for Caracas Venezuela will set your hair on fire. Or Johannesburg South Africa. Or Juarez, Tijuana and other places in Mexico. Or the favelas in Sao Paolo or Rio where the police are afraid to go. Kingston Jamaica? Haiti?

[Zacha341]

Indeed this speaks to how many now feel. Mine was not so 'deliberate'. I was simply born in Detroit, MI....

"What was once idealistic deliberate urban living has become my little slice of prison" - Great post hamtown mike.