It appears pleading for dear leader to “do something” that will help Detroit out of its death spiral passes for editorial perspective at Detroit’s ‘more conservative’ news paper.
Via The Detroit News editorial page:
President Barack Obama arrives today for a pair of fundraisers in Dearborn and West Bloomfield. The president runs on a tightly controlled schedule, but surely his suburban hosts would forgive a delay to allow him to take a detour through Detroit.
The president should see with his own eyes, and from ground level, the depth and disrepair, abandonment and danger in Detroit’s neighborhoods.
If we could suggest a route, we’d start his tour on Detroit’s largely deserted east side, past the heaps of rubble that were once businesses on Harper near City Airport, and into the blocks surrounding Denby High School off East Outer Drive, where there are more abandoned homes than occupied ones. But he could throw a stone almost anywhere in Detroit and hit neighborhoods that have been eaten away by cancerous blight.
It would be an invaluable field trip for the president — either today or sometime in the near future — to witness the shocking living conditions in so many Detroit neighborhoods. We can only imagine that he would summon the full force of his administration to get creative in seeking ways Washington could help stimulate a community revival in Detroit and, for that matter, other industrial cities that suffer from urban decay.
Really?
The opinion leaders at Detroit’s more conservative paper are pleading for Obama and his fellow Washing politicians to get creative? Didn’t we try creative with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society (way back in 1964)?
Your imagination and your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
A truly creative solution to our (here in Detroit and the rest of the United States) economic problems would involve local, state and national politicians playing a lot of golf while staying out of the economy.
