Republican activist organizes clean up in W. Baltimore

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08/06/2019 09:03

Subject: Re:Republican activist organizes clean up in W. Baltimore

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Anonymous wrote:It’s nice that he made an effort and all, but a one-time clean-up doesn’t address the systemic issues (poverty, etc.) that leads to the situation in the first place.

No. Poverty doesn't lead to trash in the streets. You can be poor and know to not throw trash in the street. It's a complete lack of respect that leads to the mess.

Actually the global, universal indicator of poverty IS trash and litter strewn everywhere.

Doesn’t matter if it’s an alley in Baltimore, an Indian reservation in Arizona, virtually anywhere in Mexico, most population centers in Africa, Russia, India, or Southeast Asia... wherever you find poor people, you will find litter.

It stems from hopelessness, and simply not caring. That’s what poverty does to the human spirit. Litter is a symptom of that.

It requires ZERO effort to put something in the trash or simply not throw it in the ground where it will be unsightly. Yet that’s exactly what happens. Why? Because what’s the point of keeping wherever you are tidy if you have no hope for anything.

Then how do you explain the dirt-poor neighborhoods of two decades back, where poor people kept everything nice and tidy? They had pride in their home, and in their neighborhood, even though they didn't have a penny to spare. What was different about 70 years ago as compared to now?

You are really embellishing history. Dirt poor neighborhoods have always been run down.

That's not true. And what do you mean by "run-down"? You mean old buildings in need of repair, or piles of garbage lining the streets? If it's the latter, I can assure you that there were many poor neighborhoods where you didn't see a scrap of trash on the curb. People had pride in where they lived.

Because they were working poor, not dirt poor, not hopeless. Working.

You are equating them. That's your misunderstanding, not mine.

No, you're making excuses.

I'm talking about NY neighborhoods during the Depression - and that was dirt-poor, not working poor. They weren't working. No jobs. I have a photo of my mother as a baby, around 1933 or 1934, and you can see clear down the street all the way to the elevated subway tracks. There isn't one single piece of trash in the curbs, or on the little walks in front of the tenement houses. So why did poor people in the 1930s and 1940s keep their neighborhoods clean, and now poor people trash up where they live?

Ah, the good old days of the Great Depression...

Ask your grandparents if they were hopeless. Or if they were hardscrabble.

Well, I can't ask my grandparents anything, anymore. May they RIP.

But they were no better off - and most likely, much worse off - during the Depression than the poor people in today's Baltimore, and still they didn't lose hope. They emphasized study and school for their children, and all of them went on to graduate from college. So why were my grandparents not hopeless, in the face of the worst economic situation in modern American history, and today's poor, with benefits such as food stamps, free lunches for the kids, Medicaid, etc., etc.,, too hopeless to pick up their own garbage?

With guns being much more proliferant in society today than they were in your grandparents' lifetimes, I can guarantee you that today's poor people in Baltimore are much worse off than your grandparents were. Get some perspective.

Oh, please. My grandparents suffered through the Depression, not even able to afford their own apartment, and now today's poor people have all sorts of safety net programs. YOU need to get some perspective on what it meant to survive the Great Depression. Your claim that today's poor have it worse - yeah, right - is still trying to justify their unacceptable refusal to put trash in the trash can.