Gentrification...

Watching BBC News this am...it seems the folks in Berlin are unhappy about the nature
and composition of the city changing as all the money and the people who make it
are flooding into their city, driving out the hippie/grunge contingent which, since the demise
of The Wall, has recently given the city its counterculture energy...

Welcome to my nightmare...

I watched, personally and closeup, as my Manhattan went from a trans-European, multicultural
Nirvana, composed of working-class (and hard-working) immigrants and their children, to
a Disney/Starbucks/Gap, Vegas-version parody of itself, populated by overpaid, over-dressed,
self-appointed Ubermensch with little but cash-flow to contribute to the lifeblood of the city.

I witnessed the destruction of all the little ethnic neighborhoods, from the Irish to the Italian to the
Eastern-European Jew to the German, with their walk-up apartments with bathtubs in the
kitchen and 6, 7, 10 people living in them--mostly happily--and saw the city hemmorage as it
suffered the transplantation of its vital organs, replacing them with Armani and Gucci
and Patek Philippe-adorned mannequins..

It's the way of the world, it seems...  Los Angeles, the place I live now (God help me), has suffered
a similar fate, of sorts...  Of course, to call LA a city is kind of a joke...it is a loosely-knit, over-
populated amalgam of lots of different, independent but interdependent cities/towns with their own
police departments and city councils...but DOWNTOWN LA (another misnomer) has suffered
this kind of gentrification, driving out the homeless who used to roam its streets after dark, or
the vagrants who roamed the pier locations of Santa Monica...  But that is hardly the same
as the forced diaspora of employed, working class people who were made to leave the
dwellings where they bore, birthed and raised children...where they tended to and, eventually,
laid out for burial their elderly...  That was the singular fate of the New Yorkers of
Little Italy, or Greenwich Village, or the Lower East Side, or Chelsea, or Clinton, or
Yorkville...

I am sure other cities suffered similar fates, but I do not come from Chicago, or Boston, or
Oakland...  If you have similar stories to share, then please do so.  I am sure that the slow
and inexorable death of cities as havens for the middle/working class is pandemic, marching along
in perfect step with the slow and inexorable death of the middle/working class...

Mandate, Schmandate...

The Supremes...that off-tune, badly-dressed group of mentally and physically decaying
lifetime-appointed cretins sitting on The Bench (if only they were only bench-warmers) in DC...
seem to be concerned about the big, bad government forcing broccoli, or burial, upon the
poor citizens of this country.  One of them, shamefully named Kennedy, is concerned that
this mandate will change the relationship of government to the citizen...
he says that forcing the citizen to do something against his (possible) will is unconstitutional...

WHAT???  Has this idiot heard of INCOME TAX?  AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE??  PROPERTY TAX???  THE FRIGGING DRAFT????????  This country has a long history of NECESSARY EVILS
being forced upon its citizenry since its inception.  IT'S CALLED BEING A CITIZEN.  IT'S CALLED ADULTHOOD. 

Ah, crap....who cares?  Why bother?  Go back to sleep, Richard...