Urban Sprawl

Urban sprawl really pisses me off. I can think of very few things that makes me angrier.
I actually had the privilege of watching the same documentary on urban sprawl on two separate occasions in two different classes.

I watched the video once in a sociology class, and then once again in an economics class.

Incidentally, the program was a PBS presentation. So I could have simply stayed at home and watched public television and would have been just as educated.

It's particularly tragic that I paid to watch the video, what with the tuition it costs to take a college course, when in all actually, I didn't even need to pay for the cost of cable TV in order to educate myself.

I could have done it for free.

Anyway, I digress.

The PBS documentary I saw twice was all about how the racial polarity of Detroit contributed to the god awful problem of urban sprawl Michigan now suffers from.

It seems as though, black people, in search of employment, migrated from the south to the north in droves, hoping to find work in the automobile industry.

As the black people moved into the city, however, the white people concluded that they didn't want to associate themselves with their new neighbors and so went about moving out of the cities and into the suburbs.

As more and more white people left the city, the funding the city once had dropped and the cities services began to decline. After the rich, the middle class white people began infiltrating the rich white areas, followed later by more affluent blacks.

This, of course, caused the racist white people to simply continue moving further out into the country side.

Meanwhile, the city these people had all abandoned began to become
ghetto like, with only poor people who could not afford to leave left behind.

Highways, and the automobile were also to blame for the urban sprawl that our nation is hell bent on ruining itself with, but in Michigan, our decimation of the country side has a great deal to do with racism.

It is also a true fact that it has long been noted by foreign peoples that Americans harbor some strange and queer hatred for trees. From day one our 'founding fathers' were out raping the land.

It is probably the case that the ignorance and hubris of the American people that would eventual cause the decimation of the country side was easily predicted by the Indians the first day those dipshit pilgrims stepped foot onto Plymouth Rock.

Squanto should have let the Pilgrims starve to death. And that's a fact.

However, the fact that the Pilgrims lived when the Indians should have left those bible thumping, puritanical morons to die doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about.

I just have a real bad hate on for the Pilgrims and every time I think about them I get pissed.

Anyway, the point is, is that the way in which our cities are structured is almost exactly the opposite of most European cities.

In Europe, it is my understanding that the very rich and affluent live in the heart of the city. Culture abounds in the downtown areas, with people going off to the theater, concerts, museums. . . . .Libraries and schools are well within the distance of convenient public transportation.

As you go further out of the city, the cultural opportunities begin to drop, the homes become less extravagant, and the incomes lower dramatically as you begin to approach the country side.

It is there in the country where the poor farmers live.

The poor farms raise animals in the fields, grow crops, and live off the land.

Here in America, people from the cities move out, thus abandoning the area altogether.

The rich leave behind the poor, and of course the poor have no money to
support much of anything, and so the schools become run down, the libraries are looted, and the abandoned theaters become 'crack houses'.

Slowly, more and more people find that they are forced to leave the city, due to violence and general degeneration, and so these people too follow in the footsteps of the rich.

Shocked and appalled at an encroachment of 'lesser people' into their area, the very rich then move further out.

Only of course to be followed at a later time by the rest of the people who must once again abandon their city.

Mean while, these idiots, who are retarded, roll over farmers, pave farm land, and piss every one off.

The way to go, of course, it to not be a racist asshole, and to stay in the city and stand your ground.

You should remain where you are and attempt to keep the quality of your city up to par rather than going and destroying the country side with your subdivisions.

These people who move their subdivisions out into the countryside are the ruination of the country.

Soon, the area I live in now at this time will no longer be 'country'.

Indeed, eventually, I predict that all of the United States of America will eventually be once sprawling, wretched city, with little pockets of farm land here and there that the god damn idiots forgot to roll over.

Urban sprawl pisses me off bad.