Don't hate cities, hate people!

 

It is (and was) hilarious in an ironic way. Hating the people but not the cities makes it sound like if the "I am Legend" plague swept through Dayton, there would be a decent city left over.

 

I object to the Boycott Dayton blog on the basis of lack of style and imagination. It's one big, poorly done, one-note, vent. There are ways to "hate" something in writing and to make it clever and readable.  I think that guy needs some therapy, or church. Or maybe a stiff drink.

I sort of looked at it as the apotheosis of the 'Dayton sucks/Fear Dayton' rants that fill up the DDN website at times, when they ask "what do you think?",  or the ongoing fear of Pleasantville becoming 'colored', like that church in Sugarcreek Twp organizing against the Islamic Center wanting to locate out there.

 

There is such a strong anti-urban undertow in the Dayton region, which this blog is symptomatic of.  Yes I know this is a national phenomenon, but it seems worse here, beyond objective concerns about things like urban schools and such.

 

 

 

 

 

Anti-urban: or more precisely, anti-diversity. Xenophobia. Actually more that, IMO, than anti-urban. You can find some real rednecks in built up areas in Ohio cities, but they often tend to like the environment. They just like *THEIR* environment as THEY expect it.

 

So do you think that this "Hate Dayton" guy basically considers city residents Morlocks? Sometimes when I've had a bad experience in an area, I think "this entire area and everyone here can go to hell". But in my mind I always come back to considering the *other* victims that never chose to live there in the first place, and the many others who mind their own business and who don't have the power to change things.

 

I mean, you can trip over the meth heads and hookers on E. Fifth Street but there are a lot of kids of those worthless trash people living there, too, who are innocents and who have no way to get out.

 

And lastly, venting about bad police, an indifferent city administration and dumbass citizens neglects the fact that the problems are part of an entire social matrix of issues. Even if you had one, 10, 100 or 1000 brave, "tell it like it is" activist types placed in that environment, they would be fighting an overall tide. And I think that extreme hardship, like the inaccessibility of decent blue collar jobs in the Dayton area, has caused the social structure to implode and decay. It's a tough area to live, even though it's "cheap", and people tend to become embittered and not get better with continual hardship. That blog guy expects the victims to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If you have no job, no prospects, etc that is just talk.

Coming from Chicago, Lousville, and Lexington has probably distorted my expectations of people's attitudes toward "the urban" or city living, or how they conceptualize city-suburb relationships, therefor my expectations are challenged here in Dayton.

 

In retropsect all these Urban Ohio posts on Dayton, and the blog posts over the past year, I think I was pretending Dayton was Louisville or Lexington

 

 

^

I'll permit myself one last comment on the subject. The Boycott blog author is guilty of exactly what has trashed the region. "Let everyone back there go to hell, they're all to blame" is what three or four generations have already said about Dayton and we now see the result. He's as bad as the power base that has allowed the commercial life of the city to seep away.

 

Trying to characterize Dayton's "spirit" today is an exercise in intense, applied nihilism. It just feels bad to try.