NOT RANDOM BUT THEY COUNT AS THOUGHTS... JUST CANNOT TELL WHAT KIND THEY ARE

Here is the deal… late 80’s early 90’s Detroit. We are in the Plymouth and Southfield area and the fallout from the 80’s crack epidemic is still visible, with vacant houses and closed small businesses (like that party store that was on Capitol Street at the north end of the block) are vacant, and shuttered.  Unkempt plots of land clutter with debris from homes that were hastily (or uncaringly) vacated.  The glass from broken windows from the empty houses that are left as shells, the plumbing ripped from the empty and wanting family dwellings.  Nearby, there is a big industrial park in the middle of the neighborhood that seems to split the area along with a freeway that completely left the neighborhood broken, literally and in spirit as well.  On the south side of the freeway cloverleaf that lingers above the freeway that splits the east from the west, is a service drive that also has a rarely used access road (mirrored on the freeway’s west side) for the industrial park that cleaves through the neighborhood, both on the east and west side of the freeway.

The combination of the underpass (the cloverleaf connecting another freeway running east-west) and the business park forms a foreboding obstacle for children walking through the area.  Everything about it screams “stranger danger”, even in daylight hours.  At night, when the prostitutes and drug dealers come out, it is more than intimidating to even the most daring teen or pre-teen, trying to get from the south part of the service drive over to the north.  None of which dissuades our teenage traveler from leaving in the late evening hours to walk through the neighborhood “dead zone” as he heads for his home.

In the 70’s it was a dangerous era for children.  There were missing children who were never found in nearby Oakland County; meanwhile, Atlanta was holding its breath as young black boys would go missing.  Those were among several cases that resulted in the protective custody style of rearing children that we see today. The leash would tighten on the children as parents stopped with the “free-range” parenting of the 50's and rearing children began to take the shape of bringing up children that we see today.  From leaving your child to run the neighborhood freely from the afternoon until “the streetlights came on” has faded into the past and in its place find the helicopter parenting and the “childproofing” of the outside world.  This story would be unlikely were it to occur now, and even in the retelling of the tale, has few equivalents that would be believed.  Only if you understood the legacies of things like COINTELPRO and MKUltra, would you even consider the possibility of the truth that you will hear.  But this, like the aforementioned programs against the people of this country, is a story that speaks on the unfettered power of the rich and the infant-like vulnerableness of all for whom real agency is but an imagined myth, learned and repeated throughout their “indoctrination” i.e., public schooling.

We are never told what policy the government has domestically… most of us begin thinking that it is a government OF the people FOR the people.  And it is, in a way.  Only it is not for nor of the people that you think it is… we are told that this country was founded in search of religious opportunity, driving the Puritans to reach out and journey to the New World.  But I never recall anyone ever talking about the business prospects that initially enriched England and the great shipping companies until “nationalization” took place through the Revolutionary War, which should have revealed the ultimate motive for the exploration of the New World… its exploitation and profiteering by the moneyed class.  From that history, putting profitability and business interest before human life comes urban neighborhoods, designed unlike the suburban areas, designed with family livability in mind.  Not only does it make for simpler policing, but it also makes for good hunting. Not only does it make for simpler policing, but it also makes for good hunting.  After all, only THE OTHER, who primarily lives outside of the city really matters, and as long as they can get from the center of the business and entertainment districts, who cares what is going on to the people who live there… after all, they are animals, the lot of them, ESPECIALLY the young.