Gentrification

A friend of mine is in the hospital. I ignored a persistent cough and decided to visit her.  I elected to park my car and use mass transit to get to and from the hospital to avoid the traffic and nightmare of driving around for a rare $12.00 parking spot.  Upon leaving the hospital in the early evening, I returned downtown to discover that finding the bus which had delivered me downtown to bring me back to my car would prove to slightly easier than finding an honest man at pickpocket convention.
          The bus routes in my city have recently been changed supposedly for the better, and no one seemed to know ANYTHING about the routes which have been in place for two months now. I asked a driver who knew nothing, a bus system employee who knew less and the final person I spoke to was a large black woman in a bad wig who only said: "Chiiild...I don't know nothing about the bus routes" as the words "Metro Administrative Officers" served  as an ironic backdrop over her right shoulder.  I walked through downtown on what was once the bus route and saw abandoned bus shelters and bus signs.
       I finally got to where I knew a bus would be when I entered an area of Houston's second ward which used to be old Chinatown. The new residents elected to call this enclave "Ea-do" to indicate that it's "east" of "downtown".  Maybe they thought they were paying homage to either London's Soho in Westminster or it's namesake in NewYork city. Hipsters are known more for their sad need to belong than for any degree of originality.
        This section 10 years ago was warehouses, empty lots and shotgun houses. Seeing opportunity, our realtors bought as much as they could, slapped up shoddy town-homes as quickly as they could and sold them for five times what surrounding properties cost. The  result was a spike in property taxes which forced long time residents to vacate because they couldn't afford to pay taxes on homes they'd owned for generations. Funny. Groups of people can be relegated to living in certain parts of a city because of real estate prices, but when those who did the initial relegation change their minds those living on that land must simply pick up and go to the next sport designated for the poor. It's basically what the U.S. Government did to the Indians and what became the state of Oklahoma.

      I walked past a vacant lot which had been a known brothel five years ago until they built town homes next to it. Strangely enough the new residents rather than trying to figure out why they'd purchased property next to a whore-house simply called the cops and harassed their "neighbors" until they eventually moved.
       I glanced over at gate that a moderately handicapped man could scale with ease and atop a tiny aluminum post slightly above my head saw a cheap security camera the size of a man's wallet. I chuckled as it caught my eye and nearly blinded me with an impossibly bright red light affixed next to its tiny lens,  I gave a toothy grin and extended my middle finger and continued walking until I heard an effeminate male voice in the darkness utter a pathetically sarcastic "thank you."  I laughed and said "I love you too pal, have a good night." How miserable is your existence if you've nothing better to do at night but watch your security camera in the dark on a Tuesday night?
      I followed the ghost bus route further until I saw what looked like a warehouse for all intents and purposes from the outside which had been converted to a bar with  and gated outdoor section. I scanned the crowd inside as well as those outside who seemed to be playing some sport with a net which could have been either badminton or volleyball (it was truly of NO consequence to me) and was saddened not to have seen a single face with any pigment. There were no blacks, no Latinos and there might have been one Asian girlfriend but she was the exception.
      The exterior was gated off the same way the town-homes a block away had been. This neighborhood until seven years ago had been black and Hispanic but now new "urban" dwellers who wanted it said they lived in the city but wished to do so without having do deal with the aforementioned put up gates to insure that they wouldn't have to.  The zoo simply wouldn't be as fun an outing without cages to protect you from the animals would it.

         I trudged along pristine sidewalks that were ignored when I and people named Fuentes and Rodriguez begged for them to be resurfaced. I walked past ugly, quickly constructed buildings whose sole purpose was to drive up property taxes and was nearly blinded by the street lamps. I couldn't help but wonder where the hell were these lights when I and neighbors  asked the city for them? Ironically black rock group Living Colour's song "Open Letter to a Landlord"  (which is about a slumlord who ignores the plight of his tenants and eventually burns the building to the ground to rebuild and sell for a profit) came on my ipod.  Irony in two senses. Living Colour initially couldn't get a record deal (until discovered by Mick Jagger) because no record execs were willing to listen to a black rock group and secondly because I found myself walking across a landscape that while familiar was seeming more alien and less inviting than it had ever been when it was what many would consider a "rough" neighborhood.

       Do I have a problem with people investing in urban neighborhoods? No I have no problem with people engaging in commerce as it makes the world go round. Do I object to people building homes and living where ever they choose? Not at all.  I am however bothered by the fact that if I built a house on the same piece of land that  it would have no effect on the value of that property.  I would welcome any man or woman as my neighbor if he or she were a decent human being.  Do I take issue with my city raising my property taxes simply because non minorities choose to become my neighbors, but LOWERING my taxes when more persons of color like myself move in? You're damned right I do. A society which tells me I'm "equal" should treat me the same way it would treat anyone else rather than using buzz worlds and phrases when I choose to live in a certain area or if someone wants me out.

        Near the end of my walk I can see my car. Three buses heading in the opposite direction passed me during my evening stroll, but as my car is in site as is the bus stop where I would have disembarked, the bus for which I was initially waiting finally passed me by.  I uttered a loud epithet before approaching my car but as I did I thought about my friend Dave who lived a few blocks away. He'd told me how some bottom feeding real estate lowlife had knocked on his door and offered to give him cash for his home. The problem is he only offered him 1/4 of the homes value. Had he sold, it would have gotten a fresh coat of paint and simply have been sold to some hipster douche-bag who would have boasted about his new place "in the city" but only after getting the latest in burglar alarms and maybe a tiny security cam atop a slender aluminum pole.

"We Smarter Than Y'all Was! "

I found myself in a classroom today in which an English teacher had an "unplanned" absence. She broke one of her ankles being Superwoman on the basketball court and to that end left no assignment for her kids.  I won't call myself a writer as I don't get paid for it, but I do pride myself in my ability to put sentences together. I gave myself five minutes to think and came up with a writing prompt which I thought wouldn't prove too daunting to a ninth grade English class. The prompt?

"The richest people in the world have offered you a charge card which gives you access to ALL their money for one week. In that week you can spend as much of their money as you can, but you agree that at the end of that week to be executed on live television. There are conditions. You can't simply GIVE their money away. You have to use it to buy things (no you can't BUY a cashiers check for a trillion and give it to your family) but the things can be bought and given away. You can't assassinate the people whose money you're spending and you can't buy your life back.  Would you take it? Explain your answer in detail."

That was the assignment. When invariably asked "How long it gotta be?" I responded "How long does it take you to express yourself? How long does it take for you to evaluate an ethical dilemma? Give me your answer and explain your answer as best you can." Some students took the ball and ran with it. I got some well thought out responses, but I also got a plethora of blank pages and the odd paper with two or three sentences as a response.

One student handed in a two sentence reply. The grammar was horrific, the punctuation was non existent and the subject verb agreement was painful. I looked at the paper and at him and asked: "Is this all you want to say?"
"YEAH!" He replied angrily. "What I'm supposed to do now?"
"Well, read and write down in your reading log." Students are given reading diaries to indicate what their reading and their degree of understanding of the materials. He did that for a few minutes then asked to go to the library. I asked why and was informed that he was "Bored." I pointed out that boredom was part of life and if he was truly bored to read something. He bellowed "I don't come to school ta mutha-fuckin' READ!" I reminded him that he was in an English class and the better part of what we did in English classes was reading and told him not to swear when speaking to me."

One of his classmates chimed in. "We aint here to read. We here to PASS!" I mentioned that every class required some reading and they were in school to learn and that learning was done quite often by reading. "Hell naw!" the student answered "We just gotta pass. We aint gotta read nothin'!"  He then stormed across the room saying "Y'all act like school was so much harder when y'all went through it. All y'all was doin' was READIN' shit. Fuck it! We smarter than y'all was cause we take more tests than y'all did! " His classmates emphatically agreed.

Part of me wanted to laugh in his face for being so ignorant, another part of my wanted to cry because he and his brethren HONESTLY believe what he said to be the truth. He's a ninth grader who reads at maybe a 5th grade level.  His vocabulary  is minuscule and he sincerely believes that not only is he my intellectual superior, but that his superiority is borne of having to take "more tests" and that all he has to do in school is "pass." He made this declaration with such conviction that I didn't doubt his sincerity.
     He reminded me of a chihuahua restrained by a leash as he charges a rottweiler.

I write this piece NOT to ridicule this child as he's obviously NOT the only one, but rather to provide those of you who are NOT in a classroom with a window into what we have to deal with in the course of our day. Children are given low standards from elementary school and are told that "good enough" is all that's expected of them.  You needn't make the honor roll, you need only "pass."  They spend a third of the school year either testing or preparing to be tested and they honestly believe that these tests accurately measure their intellect and make them as smart (if not smarter) than those attempting to teach them.
        Giving students a test once a year and using that test as a bench mark for student progress on the surface isn't a bad idea, but when you reach the point where you've created a culture of quasi-professional test takers whose only education was how to take a test you've damned an entire nation and began the path to the Idiocracy of which Mike Judge wrote.

Terrorist or Traitor? Let's say both but for legal reasons...

On November 5, 2009 United States Army Major, Medical Doctor and Clinical Psychiatrist Nadiq Hassan was on post at his duty station at Fort Hood in Texas, but that day he wasn't going to his office to treat soldiers on their way home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  His views of the United States of America, U.S. Foreign policy and the very army in which he served had slowly transformed into something ugly and twisted.  On that day Major Hassan killed 13 fellow soldiers and injured 30 more.
      He was shot and taken into custody and when he was the debate.  Many who either dislike or distrust the Islamic faith used Hassan and this incident to illustrate their feelings about Islam.   Western powers don't like admitting this, but we were essential in the creation of the autocracies of the middle east. It was a British model first tested in India by the East India Corporation.  Imperialism couldn't simply be entering a country raising your flag and claiming to be in charge, it required smoke and mirrors. There had to be an "independent country" and you had to be the great foreign benefactor. It was simple, find a random schmuck put him in an ornate palace with lots of servants and have him APPEAR to be running the country by issuing the occasional edict provided he passed no laws unfriendly to the great foreign 'benefactors' who were there to become rich while exploiting the country.
          In India the model failed because the British put the leader on an allowance and when he died his son was told to fend for himself which bred the seeds of rebellion. In the post colonial world the British realized the days of the East India Company were over. The best way to continue to get rich from the middle east was to allow them to govern themselves and to let whomever they put in charge become INCREDIBLY rich in the process. Wealthy men want to protect their wealth and absolute rulers became the norm in the middle east. What is the advantage to dealing with an autocrat? No pesky legislatures to deal with because one man's word IS law.
         The problem being that these regions tend to be unstable. The people realize they live in a dictatorship and look at where the dictator gets his money and blame the wealthy western nations who in their minds put the guy in place. How does this relate to Major Hassan? I'll get back to that in a second. The middle east changed forever when in 1979 a group of Islamic fundamentalist overthrew the Shah of Iran a strongman whose father was put in place by the British who was able to keep his father's throne after the CIA helped to oust an attempt at democracy in the 1950s. Yes the CIA ousted a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT IN IRAN to put the Shah back in charge.
        The Iranian revolution and the birth of the group the American CIA funded Mujahadin in Afghanistan after the Russians invaded created anti western fervor that grew.

         Radical Islamic clerics see any non Muslims in the middle east as an affront and those within their respective governments who allow it as traitorous. The war in Afghanistan was meant to hunt down the Al Quaida network which sprang from the Mujahadin we created after they cowardly attacked us on September 11th.  The war in Iraq supposedly was about "Weapons of mass destruction" which never actually existed or which many claimed were destroyed or simply vanished into thin air. After no weapons were found, then president George W. Bush claimed the war "was never about finding weapons but about freeing the Iraqi people."
         While fighting a war on two fronts we sent soldiers on multiple tours of duty in BOTH theatres. Combat plays havoc on the psyche of those who fight wars and those men and women have access to medical and psychiatric care.  Enter Major Hassan.
        
           Hassan spent time at Walter Reed Army hospital before being sent to the middle east and then to Fort Hood. Somewhere along the way he stopped seeing enemy combatants and saw a people with which he identified. The army should have removed him when this presented itself and didn't.
            Combat veterans I know have told me that they felt they had to dehumanize their enemy. If they considered those whom they fought human it made it difficult to do their jobs. A friend of mine who fought in Vietnam said he never killed a single "person" in Vietnam. He killed well armed "animals" who were attempting to kill him.  Hearing this on a daily basis probably made Hassan develop an us/them mentality. Rather than remembering that he was an American Army Officer he regressed to being one of a handful of Muslims in the neighborhood where he grew up. Rather than being an intelligent decorated field grade officer he was that guy in college who took flack about the ENTIRE Arab world whenever there was a terrorist action anywhere.
         At the end of the day Major Nadiq Hassan decided he was one of the "them" that we created and opened fire on US.

        Many wish to call Hassan a traitor and I am among them. You respect your uniform and the others who wear it ESPECIALLY if you are supposed to be a leader of troops. SOME call him a terrorist and TECHNICALLY he is. Should he be treated as one? I don't think so. Before anyone gets pissed at me here's why.  Terrorist belong to given groups and organizations. If we declared Hassan a "terrorist" we have to treat him under the Geneva accords and possibly hand him over to some terrorist organization which would call him some kind of hero. By declaring him a traitor (as we did) we were able to prosecute him under the fullest extent of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. What does that mean? As a service member the constitution does NOT apply to you the UCMJ does. People have been prosecuted under the UCMJ for "Assaulting a superior officer with a glass of kool aide".  As a document the UCMJ is incredibly unfair to those being prosecuted to the point where most being court marshalled opt to get civilian lawyers,
         Major Nadiq Hassan didn't deserve a "fair" trial that a terrorist would have gotten. He deserved the stacked deck that only a military court marshall would provide. As a terrorist he MIGHT have gotten life imprisonment. The penalty for treason in time of war for service members in a time of war is death by hanging or firing squad.  Hassan as a terrorist would have a chance at being a free man, Hassan as a traitor to the Uniform and flag of the United States of America will get a firing squad.