A pair of projects, from opposite sides

There are always those who use film as the best means to illustrate an issue. I’m not one of those, but I admire those who make the attempt and a couple projects in need of funding piqued my interest as they deal with problems on opposite sides of the country.

Given the distance from their Indiegogo goal, Chris and Lisa Burgard need more help in following up on a project they did several years ago called “Border.” As they note:

Back then, we filmed and documented armed narcotics traffickers breaking into the country, women being abused and tortured under rape trees, children being used by drug cartels to move product and people across the border, American ranchers routinely finding dead bodies, sometimes murdered women.  Lawlessness and violence were so bad that ranchers and their wives had to carry semiautomatic weapons in order to safely feed livestock on their own property.

The new film, tentatively titled “Beyond the Border,” promises “to expose the truth about this new wave of illegal immigration and the danger that has spread far beyond our southern border and into the American heartland.” This “movie Barack Obama doesn’t want you to see” goes against the politically correct narrative promoted by the amnesty lobby and Chamber of Commerce types that all our immigrants just want to improve their economic lot (conveniently, at a lower labor cost than they might pay comparable American workers.) Instead, the most recent influx of border-crossers is blamed for overwhelming the legal system and spreading the deadly EV-D68 enterovirus to American children.

I have my Facebook friend John LaRosa to thank for bringing my attention to “Beyond the Border” above, but the below had a little more advertising firepower than a Facebook post, so they are somewhat closer to their goal. It’s also a subject a little closer to my heart since I grew up 90 minutes (and within the reach of their sports teams and radio stations) south of Detroit. Yes, this Maryland transplant still roots for his Tigers and Lions.

I watched the original film and one thing which leaped out at me was the role of government in the demise of the city through bad planning, bad choices, and bad apples in charge. But we’re told Detroit is a city on the rebound.

As Executive Producer Ben Howe describes it, though:

Detroit is often framed as a lost cause but we never hear the whole story. What brought the city to this point? Not chance, but incompetence, corporate cronyism, greed, and above all, corruption.

To the people of Detroit, this is a personal reality – a reality about the homes and lives they built, and some have lost, and that all want back and improved. They want to see their city thrive again. They will not concede to defeat and despair. The Detroit Project will spotlight the people experiencing the bankruptcy first-hand, and most importantly, the people who are doing something about it.

We intend to fearlessly engage with those in power that claim to be working on behalf of the people. We will investigate how city planners are spending public money, what projects are in the works, and what they believe the focus of city efforts should be.

Is Detroit headed for a future of prosperity that harkens back to her earlier years? Or are they going down the same troubled path that brought them to the brink? Who do you trust to answer those questions? Someone has to hold the policy makers accountable. Together with your help, that is precisely what we intend to do.

Over the last half-century the region that we consider Detroit has spread out over countless suburbs in surrounding counties, with bedroom communities spreading out from Oakland and Macomb counties on the north to Ann Arbor on the west to Monroe toward the south. It’s created somewhat of a donut effect as entire blocks of inner-city Detroit were abandoned to the elements and certain remaining homes in the city proper can literally be purchased for less than $100. Indeed, it’s a tale of people who once drove from the suburbs downtown to work now mainly commuting from one suburb to another – only returning downtown to catch the aforementioned Tigers or Lions before retreating back out I-75, I-94, or I-96 – and the reasons deserve a thorough investigation.

These are just two examples which piqued my interest. But elements of both could actually be applied locally as illegal immigrants have made their way to our area, settling in a city which has seen its own share of tough economic times but whose downtown is enjoying a little bit of a renaissance which is hoped will continue with the opening of new entertainment venues and plans for more residential development. I don’t think we quite need a film in these veins about Salisbury but the lessons learned could be illustrative.

No longer in Paris

I’ll admit it: I still have a soft spot for Detroit.

It’s not so much of a love for the American automobile or for Motown music, although both are important parts of the city’s impact on our nation and our culture. But growing up as I did in the Rust Belt, the fortunes of my hometown and its much larger neighbor to the north were intertwined in any number of ways because we, too, were dependent on the auto industry. On a cultural basis, I grew up watching and rooting for their professional sports teams (still do) and was close enough to be within their media footprint. Maybe Mark “The Bird” Fidrych,  the onetime Top 40 blowtorch CKLW,  J.P. McCarthy,  Ted Nugent,  Bob Seger, and hilarious Highland Appliance commercials weren’t household names and cliches in these parts, but we in Toledo knew who and what they were.

Yet Detroit has come to be known now as the very symbol of urban decay, a place where rotting buildings are giving way to urban farmscapes and half the population left in the last half-century. It’s in that vein that I read a piece today by Amanda Melson.

Melson uses the age-old scapegoats of continual Democratic city governance and the rise of Big Labor to paint a picture of a city in decline, and to a certain extent she is correct. But were they the only culprits?

Starting in the middle of the last century, Detroit was among many large cities which saw the expansion of its core area come to a halt as it ran into growing suburbs spread like acorns around the parent tree. The idea of spreading out and getting away from the cramped city center to a place where the kids could play in the yard and go to school in a modern building with all the conveniences was enticing to those very laborers who worked 40 hours a week in the auto plant and saved up their money so their children could have a better life in the suburbs of Oakland or Macomb counties, or even “downriver” toward Monroe, with the hope of them someday being able to attend college up the road in Ann Arbor or East Lansing. The price of a daily commute on I-75, I-94, or I-96 was worth the cost of having a place of their own far from the city center which was already crumbling.

Those who remained became the victims of that so-called “urban renewal” touched upon by Melson; the first of what is now a third or even fourth generation of poverty doomed to a meager existence because of poor schools and a lack of good job opportunities since most of the original Detroit-area auto plants have long since closed up shop. Of course, the same thing was happening in my hometown on a smaller scale – we left our home in the city to live on five rural acres with the intention of having a place where three active boys had room to play. And to some extent the same story can be written for any number of Rust Belt cities; places like Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Flint, or Gary. But Detroit is most interesting because of the depth to which it’s succumbed from the height it achieved.

It’s also intriguing as a case study of a donut in reverse and a theory gone wrong. Granted, it’s been close to a decade since I set foot in the city, but my recollection is there are small parts of Detroit which are livable and lively. They’re centered around the edifices of a new century: the three casinos in downtown Detroit and two new midtown sports facilities: Comerica Park for the Tigers and Ford Field for the Lions. But all that investment doesn’t seem to have impacted the city as a whole like it was supposed to – if you walk a mile away from these places, not only would you be taking your life into your hands but you would see the squalor of a city abandoned.

So now we introduce the idea of “right-to-work” to the Detroit area. While the unions and Barack Obama whine that it will bring about a race to the bottom for wages, I look at things differently. Consider the skill level of the average would-be Detroit worker who’s never really had the responsibility of going to a job each day and creating a product or performing a service above a menial level. Do they honestly create enough value to be worth union scale? If this encourages a little bit of investment in Detroit I see that as a good thing, even if the Democrats are cut out of a few thousand dollars’ worth of largess through confiscated dues.

But I don’t see that as being much more than a drop in the bucket as long as the general attitude remains that the world owes Detroit a living. It’s a model of governance which has failed its remaining citizens miserably, yet those pool souls don’t understand that they’re the root of the problem because they make the same choices their most recent ancestors did yet believe the results will be better.

That insanity isn’t confined to Detroit, but they make the best poster children for the theory. Follow their path at your peril.