Guns, Butter, and Led Zepplin

[Occhidiangela]

A hell of a long time ago, the government started giving farmers money to not grow food. This put an uncounted number of black folks out of work. They went and they crammed in to cities.

This storm destroyed more than a city. It wrecked a ghetto. A complete system failure with people so indoctrinated and controlled that most are incapable of thinking independant thought for themselves. They did what the government told them to do, and trusted in that.

It's a very sad thing to watch and I have worried that this sort of breakdown was coming someday.
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Your cause and effect chain of history is an interesting take on the topic of urban blight, both material and spiritual, but I'll toss a few grounders your way.

1. Some people do get out

2. The crime of the civil rights era and the great society is that, for one reason or another, the urban schools were left, far too often, to rot. The voucher system was a cost effective way of doing even less for public schools, whose rot was, I guess, diagnosed as terminal. So, as a society, we gave up. That, after the aims and goals of the civil rights initiatives post WW-II is the profound human tragedy.

3. A ghetto is a state of mind. Robert Kaplan found very poor people in Turkey when he traveled there, but their inner pride was evidenced in how clean they kept their very meagre housing.

4. Swamp castle and New Orleans. Somehow, for a place that was infamous for the occasional display of huge tracts of land, the problem of building another castle on that swamp will boil down to a matter of human spirit.

5. This ain't just New Orleans' problem, in the big scheme of things. The profound economic impact of New Orleans not being up 100% as a fuel terminal and port of embarcation for all kinds of products, from the heartland's,won't be felt for another few months. But it will be felt.

New Orleans was/is no sleepy little seaside town, she's a major commercial center.

Occhi