I feel like Columbus Charles Dickens!

 “There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as in any dream.”

 

“ Three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Saturdays.”

 

“Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.”

                                                            Dickens    (Oliver Twist)

“He ate and drank the precious words

His Spirit grew robust-

He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was Dust.

He danced along the dingy Days

And this Bequest of Wings

Was but a Book-What Liberty

A loosened Spirit brings-

Emily Dickinson

 

 

The New Frontier seems just that!  I feel like Columbus standing on the shore of a new continent of discovery in Social Anthropology and I never even knew it was here in tetonic proportions.  “There are more things in heaven and earth Heraccio than you and I have ever dreamed.”

 

The ‘Upgrading’ of the American low income urban scene; the recycling project of the Business class to re-do, revitalize city slum areas, or third world type neighborhoods across the country has stirred a hornets nest of controversy for some people.  Strangely there is militant opposition to such renewal and upgrading projects in some areas in the cause of landlord oppressing the tenant victim.  (Which may be the case in many instances but surely not most.)  Is it not reasonable and commendable to reclaim broken down property and fix it up?  Get over it.  Get a job.  Get out of the slums.  That is my recommendation for rebels without a cause.  That’s what I would do myself and so give my advice with a spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down.  If the renter is a dead beat than he or she must assume the responsibility for their actions and inactions to keep up the property and pay the rent.  There are exceptions and we generally know who they are.  The handicapped, the elderly, the mother with children, etc.  But healthy able bodied citizens or non citizens need to carry there own share of their own load.  Makes good sense to me.  And perhaps to anyone who is forced to carry that load for very long would agree.  Bear your own burden as much as possible and we help each other with those occasional hard places.  But not a permanent welfare roll.  The world does not owe you or me a living.  We must do our part.  This is something the French Revolution did not carry far enough.  After pulling down the Bastille and beheading hundreds of thousands of “enemies” of the people..The unruly mobs were still their own worst enemies. 
Lets stop blaming the landlords, the government, the whites, the positions, the somebody else’s, and lets start facing our own dilemmas and our own accountabilities with the good grace to find a way out with God’s help.

 

The article by the way on Edge City by Joel Garreau is written so well.  I truly enjoyed his mind.  Whether or not I understand his gist, he writes so well I would like to hear more of what he has to say.

I hear him when he relates Irvine as Edge City (one of millions)

Irvine a concrete jungle.  With so many freeways and Industrial Parks you would be lost in Edge City Space without a chart and compass to navigate by.

The rent gap is a problem that has portentous implications and dimensions in its huge tangled legislation problems.  Like Jacque Cousteau the Oceanographer, we explore these new waters we have seldom sailed in.

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