The Strib ran on op-ed by a Mickey Cook, of North Minneapolis.
The whole thing ably reflects the elephant in the Metro DFL’s collective room; the CIty of Minneapolis has, for decades, left North Minneapolis to other people to fix. While the City has invested endless money, time and care in the South side, Northeast and Dinkytown, the Northside is the hot potato in a perennial game between the City, the State and the Feds, with everyone going “Not It”.
It’s a good piece; read the whole thing. Here’s the pullquote:
This community is falling apart, and Minneapolis is investing in an overpriced football stadium downtown and green ways and bike lanes that go largely unused in “NoMi.” The City Council is voting to ban plastic bags, while investors shoehorn complex after complex of “affordable housing” into north Minneapolis neighborhoods. Yet we can’t even maintain the mainstays of a decent retail chain store or a reliable grocery store that isn’t constantly threatening to pull out. We can’t get take-out without getting taken out. We have no peace with all of the boom cars.
Mr. (?) Cook has got the problems figured out cold.
The solution? Let’s talk (emphasis added):
We can see you, Minneapolis. We can see the lack of attention from the police chief and the mayor, failing to enforce what few laws we do have.
There is no shortage of laws in North Minneapolis, or anywhere else in the state. Everything that goes wrong in NoMi breaks some kind of law or another.
But enforcement?
We can see the rats’ nest of bureaucratic yarn tangle. These two officials have wholeheartedly turned their backs on this neighborhood. Their predecessors, as far back as I can remember in my four decades of living in Minnesota, have never summoned enough gusto to get things truly under control.
One wonders what sort of effort, or gusto, it would take – and whether Minneapolis’s Social Justice caste (based more in Kenwood and Crocus Hill than in NoMi, and sodden with political clout in both city halls and the state capitol) would tolerate it.
But least of all would the Social Justice caste tolerate the one thing the citizens of North Minneapolis could do that would give them a genuine voice; break their ties with the DFL and vote for an alternative to the failed one-party system that’s gotten them where they are.
There’s no incentive for the Mpls DFL to fix NoMi. Those are captive votes, while the trendy hipster vote is more fickle. But even if you were to come up with a competitive political agenda for NoMi it’d never go anywhere due to local social pressures and bigotry.
In short: just remember, for “progressives” the idea is to appear concerned, not to actually accomplish anything. If they were actually concerned about results then they wouldn’t be pushing Head Start or universal pre-K.
The residents of NoMi are the DFL’s Palestinians.
Cook is just pissed because he sees all his neighbors getting free stuff, and he’s not getting any.
Detroit proved beyond any doubt that leftist blood suckers will ride a city right down into the ashes, and the moochers they rely on to stay in power are just as happy surrounded by burned out buildings as the elites are in carefully manicured parks…as long as the free stuff keeps coming.
Mr. Cook just needs to move, ’cause nothing is ever going to change in Minneapolis.
This may mirror an issue brought up a couple of years ago. The progressive-left machinery went all out for homosexuals. We got gay marriage in 10 years from when, in the 3,000 years of civilization, it was first really seriously brought up in mainstream society. Meanwhile black-Americans continue to live in more poverty than everyone else. Have their high crime neighborhoods. its like the left just passed them up for the gays.
Why? Ask your hipster millennials about going to the gay rights fest. Why of course. My gay friends are so much fun. Its so festive and fancy. Everyone dancing and singing.
Are you going to Juneteenth celebration? God no. Going to the scary part of town where all those guys with their pants down around their knees are.
Mitch, you should look into what Senator Johnson is doing in North Milwaukee. Working to get inner city blacks jobs (and providing transportation) in Sheboygan county. They have jobs there (good paying manufacturing) and not enough workers. North Milwaukee mirrors north Minneapolis.
Half the island of Hispaniola is a former Spanish colony of Dominican Republic; the other half is a former French colony of Haiti. When a hurricane strikes, citizens of the Dominican Republic rebuild while citizens of Haiti wait for Americans to rebuild for them. The Dominican Republic side of the island is thriving compared to the Haitian side. It’s a cultural divide – one side works to succeed, the other side waits to succeed. The loudest voices being heard in North Minneapolis are those waiting for success, not working for it.
Conditions won’t change until the culture changes but the most powerful legacy of slavery is the belief that White people lack the moral authority to lecture Black people about their culture. Fine, I’ll butt out. But that also absolves me of any responsibility for other peoples’ cultural choices.
Sounds as if I don’t care, or at least, don’t care about Black people, so I’m probably a hateful racist, right? No, if I were a hateful racist, I’d be recommending Blacks continue on their path to destruction. It’s because I do care that it bothers me to see them on it. I wish I could help. But you can’t help someone change their mind, they have to want it themselves.
JD
I’ve often suggested that UN world HQ should be moved from NYC to Haiti for several reasons;
a) nobody at the UN cares about Haiti because they have NO political significance,
b) it would give the UN a chance to prove definitively that soci@lism works,
c) all the servants for UN staff and dignitaries would speak French which they like,
d) it would put some prime NYC real estate back on the tax rolls, and,
e) it might actually upgrade the island infrastructure, literacy and medical care to a standard comparable to the early 20th century.
JD knocks it out of the park.
Nasty reality here, if you run the numbers, is that the city can’t solve the problems. Odds are that a boy without a father is going to get, at some point in his life, a warden instead. Odds are that a girl without a father is going to have babies without involving the father in her life.
You look at the list of maladies shown in the article, and there are not too many that aren’t often resolved by a “dad”. The city can put the kids in jail (my point #1) and send armies of kids to clean neighborhoods up, but change happens when people see the need for “dad.”
That’s an interesting observation, Chuck. I’m going to take it a step further (’cause that’s what I do). The left defends the thug culture that has evolved in black neighborhoods…of course they never admit it’s thug culture, it’s black culture, see. Call it out for what it is, and you’re racisss.
The left has a vested interest in keeping thug culture moving along. You start getting black kids pulling their pants up, keeping their pants on, putting the pistols down and going to school and pretty soon you have a generation of winners raising the next generation of winners. Winners don’t need free stuff, which means they don’t need pandering politicians promising nothing more than free stuff.
And we all know the Democrat party can’t have any of that.
Ever notice everyone gets an “RIP T-shirt” when L’il G gets riddled with bullets? Moms can’t give that interview telling how L’il was just turning his life around (was planning on starting college next year) until she gets one.
Those are people that understand capitalism, and markets; they saw a need and filled it. They probably don’t even realize they are Republicans.
And we all know the Democrat party can’t have any of that
Swiftee, for the black community to not see the hellhole the Democrats have been keeping them in for 3+ generations, the sociological ramifications thereof, and the conditioning that they’re stuck in that hellhole because of racissss Republicans, it’s almost to the point where the leftists/democrats have gone beyond mere indoctrination of that community. They must have moved beyond indoctrination to some form of mass hypnosis.
But wait-I thought getting rid of plastic bags, not having to gaze at the Confederate flag, and making sure lake Calhoun has the adjacent Native American name along side it would create utopia. Nothing more important than hurt feelings
If 20 years on the South Side of Chicago won’t convince Dear Leader that something we’re doing is seriously messed up, and that we’re making it worse, I don’t know what will get through.
The big thing that getting rid of open displays of the “Southern Cross” will do is to take away the easy excuses. But that still leaves the very difficult task of persuading people of Pogo’s Law: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” And that means we have to get heard over the rhetoric of the race hustling poverty pimps, which unfortunately includes our President at this moment in time.
I thought Obama solved all this.