Well said, @KVV. Your point about the reaction if someone used rural Ohio for political expediency hits home. I don’t come from rural Ohio, but I do come from a post-industrial and semi-rural region of Ohio that has been devastated by opioids, chronic poverty, and lack of opportunity. Yet those same people are quick to point to urban crime and the political leadership in the cities as problematic. They are less apt to focus inward on their own issues and invariably take offense at so-called coastal elites seeing them as in flyover country. The idea of there being two Americas, with the heartland being the “real” America is very much present.
Incidentally, I’m fairly certain ED would dismiss my hometown in Ohio as a “shithole” he has no interest in visiting.
Can confirm. Every other car here is constantly flirting with the Vehicular Big Right Miss, a/k/a swerving through five pedestrians in the crosswalk while taking a rolling right turn at a red light. It’s like Mad Max with a T.G.I. Friday’s instead of Bulletville, and all the War Boys are wearing flip-flops.
It’s certainly your prerogative to feel safe in any neighborhood you choose. While I might be of the opinion that kind of attitude is unwise, you’re a grown man and can make your own decisions.
But I will say that the characterization of Baltimore’s crime problem being mostly limited to those involved in gangs or the drug trade strikes me as disingenuous, as does the comparison with car accidents in Florida. Putting aside the statistics (in 2017, there were 218 auto fatalities in metro Orlando, from a population of 2.7 million, and more than 65 million tourists; compare to Baltimore’s more than 300 murders with a fraction of the population and visitors), it’s just not true that if you’re not buying heroin, you have nothing to worry about. As just one example, the city has been averaging more than 500 carjackings per year over the past three years.
I’m sorry, but there’s nothing inherently racist about being concerned when reading stories like this.
I’m not from the heartland. I grew up in a diverse northeast city of more than 100,000 in the 1980s when the national murder rate was about double what it is now, and I lived in a majority black neighborhood for most of that time. We averaged less than 1 murder in the city per year. Against that backdrop, I find the idea that there’s not even a single neighborhood in Baltimore, a city with more murders per year than half the states in this country, I can consider to be unsafe without being a racist absolute BS.
This might come across as patronizing, but it is sincere - @KVV is the type of writer that 18 year old me wanted to be until 19 year old me decided it was too damn hard and probably unlikely to happen.
I am very glad he shared some more thoughts on the subject. In my earlier post I decried the fact that so many people in today’s society shit on something and judge it without having direct knowledge of it. I am not from Baltimore originally nor do I live there now. My “ties” to the city are from going to the occasional Orioles game in college and never leaving the inner harbor and now through the fact that my brother lives there and I visit him a few times a year to play golf and/or go out in the city and nearby environs. I’ve never seen The Wire (I know, shame on me) but I knew enough about it that my image of the city prior to my brother living there was that it was a shithole outside of the inner harbor.
Now that I have been visiting somewhat regularly I can admit that I was 100% wrong. Yes, the city has problems, in fact serious ones - but almost everywhere in America does. However, the city has tons of great history, culture, food, etc. Again, I am not an expert on the city, but my point is that by visiting it more often I realized that my perception of it was wrong. I have two young children and have no qualms about going into Baltimore with them.
My final point is just to encourage people to challenge their preconceptions. Go visit places like Baltimore and go beyond the typical tourist spots. Patronize the local businesses that are trying to revitalize neighborhoods. I don’t know what the ultimate solution is to improve the problems that face Baltimore, or rural Ohio, or America as a whole. But, I firmly believe that nothing will improve if we resort to tribalism and only visit the places we know and feel comfortable with and only interact with people that always agree with us.
