I (Heart) City Life

I Love City Life! Yayyyy! living in a bad neighborhood, all cozy in my overpriced rowhome, driving my hybrid, drinking my chai tea and walking my small dog after dropping my perfect little kids off at their elite school. maybe i'll go to the museum today, maybe i'll open my own gallery. who knows? the possibilities are endless when you live the city life!

"I Love City Life!" previously i'd only been aware of the bumper stickers, but apparently, livebaltimore.com offers a plethora of merchandise (dog leashes, fleeces, and other yuppie trash) to propagandize their veiled vision of Harm City.

having gone to private school in north baltimore for 12 years, i saw my share of these ridiculous fucking stickers, plastered on the backs of volvo station wagons, luxury machines, and various sport utility vehicles driven by small mothers with limited agendas.

if this wasn't baltimore, maybe i could ignore them. i mean, every city in this country, in the world, is stratified along class and racial lines. classic haves and have nots scenario. but this is baltimore you fucking yuppies, have some empathy.

fucking 78 murders in 2007 so far. i could stop there. but i really want to indict these sons of bitches.

past distinction as the heroin/std/aids/teen pregnancy capital of the country. troubling jobless/illiteracy/poverty rates. the public domain nightmare that is the east side. numerous tv shows attesting to our (yes, our) crack/heroin problem and the hyperviolence that characterizes the real "city life." even our police are downtrodden, so much so that they just aren't brutalizing as much as say, lapd or nypd (though there was some buzz around mayor-induced arrest quotas last year). this is the city that bleeds, and even our cops acknowledge it.

and our public schools. jesus. characteristically american, in the vein of houston, la, south carolina, or new orleans. but there's a distinct character to the baltimore school, helped along by a city hall too busy bickering with one another to do much about it. hell, recently, a board executive was caught stealing three million dollars from the public school system's budget. gotta love city life.

reading the police blotter in this town is akin to reading a report on the day's war dead. it's just fucked up, and the fact that the city's better-off make light of the plight of urban baltimore with their yellow stickers is even more fucked up and discouraging. but it's a classic case of us v. them, the duality of modern life that is both our greatest asset and our greatest foe.

and beyond baltimore, with a global shift towards urbanization (which of course means overcrowding, then increased pollution, rises in crime and unemployment, and ultimately the death of the earth), we'll see how much these yupster fucks (heart) city life in 10, 20, 30 years.

ps. big ups to baltimorecrime.blogspot.com, hit it up