[WASHINGTONPOST] A city of a thousand headlines. The race battles, police brutality and streets with empty storefronts and boarded-up houses paint a picture of Baltimore that isn’t as shining as its tourism website tells you.The Inner Harbor's a tourist destination. Three or four blocks away you'll be relieved of any money you've got in about five minutes. You might be killed in minute six.
But what happens when even other Marylanders won’t back up the city?
Why should we?
I live about 15 miles outside Baltimore in the suburbs of Harford County.
My ZIP code used to break out to Baltimore. I'm just south of the city limits.
When riots began after the arrest and death of Freddie Gray last spring, all school-sponsored trips to Baltimore City were suspended. The ban was lifted after the riots and protests subsided, but it was reinstated in January after what Harford County deemed "threats to safety." Baltimore officials were frustrated for obvious reasons.
"Hey! There ain't no more money comin' in!"
"Harford County Public Schools is doing an enormous disservice to its students and families with this bizarre policy," Del. Brooke E. Lierman (D-Baltimore) said.
My daughter-in-law's restaurant burned last year. Junkies had cleaned out anything salvageable literally before the ashes had fully cooled. She lives about four blocks away, in a "nice" neighborhood. She can't leave anything out on her porch because the junkies will steal it. I don't know how many times her house has been broken into while she's been away. That sort of thing might have something to do with the "bizarre" policy.
Howard Libit, a front man for Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), said, "We are afraid the lesson being taught to the children of Harford County is to fear the city, and that is disappointing."
There's a reason y'gotta drive to the county for the pharmacy.
The policy indeed promoted a sense that the city was too unsafe or unfit for the dear children of Harford County to visit.
Visit, maybe. Don't spend much time there. Don't leave the Inner Harbor or Little Italy.
Not only did the obvious race distinctions come to mind,
... to people who get published in the Washington Post. I don't know if she got published in the Baltimore Sun (Light for All is its motto). Nobody reads it anymore.
but so did the idea that Harford County was "above" Baltimore City.
In the sense that Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is "above" someplace in Lesotho.
If a group of kids from the suburbs isn’t allowed to go to the aquarium because of safety issues, why is nothing being said about the students who have to walk those same streets to get to school?
Lots is said about them. Reams of paper have been generated about them. Billions and probably trillions of bytes have been generated. The populace keeps voting the same set of crooks into office, based on political party.
Every politician pleads that we come together, hand in hand,
People have ceased caring about them.
but if the local government can’t stand by trips to the Maryland Science Center, are we ever going to get anywhere as a nation?
We can get anywhere we want as a nation. Baltimire City continues to stew in its self-pitying juices. Ptui.
After I reached out to the Harford County school board,
She called and bitched and probably threatened to sue them.
the policy on field trip bans was reversed. I was overjoyed that members changed their position because of opposition from both communities, but I was still troubled by the county executive’s comment on the lifting of the ban: "It affords our students a great opportunity not only to see those institutions but also the learning aspect of seeing how other folks live." Can we really join together as a state if neighbors describe neighbors as "other folks"?
The neighbors have trash-strewn streets and open narcotics trafficking. Every time I drive to a VA appointment I have to run a gauntlet of beggars. Same street corners, starting with the one directly in front of Ravens Stadium, each block up Martin Luther King Boulevard. Bring the kiddies to see.
Maybe what I’m about to say sounds like something straight out of a Bernie Sanders
...The only openly Socialist member of the U.S. Senate. Sanders was Representative-for-Life from Vermont until moving to the Senate for the rest of his life in 2006, assuming the seat vacated by Jim Jeffords...
promo, but as a white, middle-class high school student from the suburbs, I am disturbed that they are separating me and "other folks."
Go live with the "other folks" for a week or two. Pick a "nice" neighborhood.
This isn’t just a small tiff among local governments; it’s a piece of a much larger issue facing the United States. There is a great divide among rural and urban communities. But we can’t begin to fix what ails Baltimore until we see ourselves as one.
Baltimire used to be a nice city. Nobody's gonna fix it but the city administration, and so far it's made it worse.