Detroit
I posted the following recently to an online group:
After watching Sugar Man, I went online to try to check out his old haunts. I started "dropping pins" on Google Maps, which enable you to get street views. It was pretty interesting to see ordinary Detroit neighborhoods today.
It's a freakin' pit, of course, and no doubt still dangerous, but I was mostly struck by the desolation. It's a huge place that use to hold, what, 1.5 million people? Now it's down under 800,000? It shows. Large swaths of land overgrown with weeds and grass, empty houses. I think that, if you walked along many of those streets for five minutes, you wouldn't get mugged for the simple reason that nobody else is there.
I suspect Detroit might be ripe for entrepreneurial plucking, especially now that it may have hit bottom and the State is getting involved in its financing. Yeah, I know: "You, Eric Scheske, think it's good for the State to get involved and take over a City's finances? What happened to Mr. Subsidiarity-Nearly-to-the-Point-of-Anarchy?"
I still think Detroit would make a great laboratory experiment in libertarianism, but I'm thinking maybe, just maybe, no one is going to take my advice and, instead, the forces that have destroyed it will continue to control. This recent development, though, marks a shift away from the local-dominated forces that have proven corrupt and incompetent to the core. Neither Detroit nor its government has any significant redeeming qualities, so I don't really think the State can hurt and it might open the door for some change. And although I'm normally suspicious of change for change's sake, in Detroit's case, any change is worth trying. At worst, it'll merely be a lateral move ("Situation Sucks A" to "Situation Sucks B"), it might improve things, and there's no going down.
Something for Lent
"The Rosary is a prayer of lingering." Romano Guardini
