Some years ago I was riding a bus through one of the most impoverished areas in Baltimore, just north of the Johns Hopkins hospital - for the most part empty shells of row houses, debris all over the street, etc. In front of one of the few still inhabited houses someone planted sunflowers in an empty tree-well in what used to be the sidewalk. The contrast between bright "happy" faces of sunflowers and the urban decay that surrounded them was truly striking. Clearly, someone tried to make this dump a decent place to live - a valiant effort indeed, against all odds. It reminded me of the picture of a lone man standing in front of the column of tanks in the Tienanmen square that "made the news." Except that the corporate media are more interested in showing the failures of communism than capitalism, so there was nobody there to document this person's struggle against capitalist land use policies.
Some time later, Hopkins bought those few blocks of urban wasteland and razed them in what was supposed to be redevelopment. There was no place for the sunflowers in those plans, so they went with the demolition debris, I guess. Then came the great recession of 2007 - a fine point of the casino capitalism roller coaster economy indeed - and the redevelopment plans were razed too. Today there are only empty lots waiting for a money grubber to "redevelop" this land.
What makes me sad about this situation is not that it happened. After all, this is the normal working of capitalism - the market, the business model, and the race to the bottom it perpetrates. I do not expect anything else from the psychopaths elevated to "leadership" positions. What I do regret, however, is that I did not have a camera on that bus ride so I could document what I saw. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
