Save our city! or don't

While I'm being all Margaret Bourke-White ish, I will continue my photo-journey through all of our lives today (?). Actually, my cell phone pics are a fairly exacting portrayal of what life was actually like during The Time of Decline.

Like many of us, I live in a city that is dying/has died. Houses are vacant, every story on the local news is a drug murder or crime, the last industry has all but dried up. Good-hearted bands of citizenry have little civic meetings where some nice ideas are posited, such as using some of the vacant lots around for community vegetable gardens, as restaurants like to tout local produce, etc. Okay. But we stand at a convergence of urban decline/civic inefficacy/severe recession from which there just might not be a renaissance/springtime.

Last Saturday I saw some sketchy dudes in a beat-up conveyance selling roses for Valentine's Day. Their propped-up sign read, in a gluehead 4th grader's scrawl:

VALENTINE
TIME FLOWERS
HERE

And then it was that I realized just how far it all is out of all of our hands. The earth needs a rest. This city, this world...it may be time for a cold, bright light to come, scouring it all clean.

And then: rest. Rest.