How's Your Hegira Today ?

Right after world war II, in my hometown, everybody went to Detroit either to get a better job or to buy a car and bring it back home to sell for a profit. (Sadly, the one Betts and I bought had MUCH salt-rust-rot from many a Wayne County Winter. At that time, Detroit was pushing 2 million population. In the census just completed, it has 714,000 and it’s Mayor (Bing) is hollering “FOUL” and trying to drum up or fake 40,000 citizens to qualify the city for top-tier Federal sugar-teat money. The Big Hegira began very stealthily when the Big Three Automakers began, in the 1950's, to build assembly plants closer to markets, and farther away from super-expensive labor contracts. But through the years, deterioration of schools, failure of police departments and—yes, Raaaacism!—sent families to suburban neo-safety and then to other locales in the United States. In just the last 10 years, Detroit has lost 271,000 population or 25% of its nearly one million since 2000. Chicago also has lost many families. From a peak population of 3.6 million in 1950 to 2.7 million this year, or 25 percent. Detroit has lost 60% of its peak 1950 population. My ancient brain is not Byzantine enough to mine all the excuses the sociologists and economists will amass—OR, whether this is signature to the end of U.S. “Industrialism” versus a “Harbinger” of a “New Era” of employment / economic challenges. I say it is both. But, mainly and most significantly these figures are a loud dawn trumpet blast announcing the people’s response to an ongoing Culture War. It is an amalgam of schools on the skids, corruption in county and municipal government, including deteriorating protection of family and personal security. It has been proven in a massive laboratory (Manhattan) that when all laws are strictly enforced, all so called “major:” crime rates fall. Courts that sow slapped wrists will reap smack syringes, crack pipes, wholesale rape and murder. Schools that wink at no learning and promote illiterates will soon stare horrified at unemployable Zombies. And, not even the millennium generation can see the downside here. No one will be courageous enough to say it. As usual, fomenting a race war will be easier for the airheads. But the people---of ALL races--- are running away form places where there is no valuable instruction; no right and no wrong; where evil thrives unidentified and unchallenged...places where there is no Good News and no meaning to Life. Neither riches nor government programs can change the human heart / Spirit...and many human Spirits add up to a healthy culture and a fertile society. This one is dying.