I was reading about David Simmon's "rants" and I found he and I to have similar complaints bout the world. It seems like he tries so hard to give everybody an equal voice and to do this embedded, non-shot gun style reporting, and yet editors respond by saying its good, but where is the problem to be solved. The problem with the problem is that it is so unwieldy and so blurred that it cannot be comprehended to the point where it may not even be a problem at all but rather more of a sealed fate. In the real world people are not always anything, and that is why an intelligent observer of life at this point should be beyond good and evil. Yet as the President reluctantly reminded us," Make no mistake, evil exists in the world." ...I would say at least to the point of an ethical consensus. If a man rapes and kills a child maybe he should be put to death. What bothers me are the judgements people so readily make about people they know so little about. The need to find evil, and to maintain the myth that aside from occasional crime, We Americans are safe and our institutions are in control is essential to most of them.
I know a different truth; one that I have yet to fully grasp and put into words. Here is a beginning.
Funktown-my stomping grounds 2004-present.
Im a bad dude in tha town. But my roots there are in my relationship to the community. If I did not give back, I wouldn't have the kind of respect that I do. But I am not one of them. Still, gentrification scares me more than tha corner boys. But what really is gentrification? It is a word people liked to use around the turn of the last century. People in a neighborhood like mine, not quite the ghetto but still tha hood, fall into a few class groups. There are the working class families who usually fit a lot of people into a small place, the first apartment/young urban hipster type (which has many off shoots or subcategories) and then the lower classes. How low can the classes go you ask? Well if you have a house on section eight you have much lower living expenses. The stereotypical image of a section eight recipient is someone who uses drugs or is utherwise unemployable. Really there are all types, but many of them are depressed. As I stated earlier, depression is linked to substance abuse. I will try and pick up on this thread for my next rant... giving some examples. But back to Simmon. I had always felt that drug addicts were unfairly criminalized. Similar to Simmon, I find that the only way to explain this world is to recreate it from the inside, and to get into the head of several different addicts to paint a picture. Thats ideal for many situations, but almost necessary if one wants to understand the life of a nock. For my next rant I will remember to: get into some people's housing situations in detail, and get into West Coast heroin language based on Simmon's attention to detail. In the end I hope to get out enough real information that can be assembled into a journalistic essay. Hopefully I get to do it in conjunction with my studies. Whatever i am doing, I will finally put this knowledge to use in a way that is meaningful to me.
Thank you and goodnight
Cdub
