Immigrant song.

A friend volunteering in Senegal passes along this interesting tidbit from another Peace Corps Volunteer:

Senegal’s President Wade decided, in the face of the tragic events unfolding in Haiti, to offer the gift of mobility to earthquake victims. That’s right, he’s offering to “repatriate” (in his words) the people of Haiti to Senegal. Seeing as how Haiti was founded by freed slaves, he figured they might want an opportunity to resettle in their homeland. And he says he’s willing to give them an entire region (though, his aide emphasized, to be clear, it would be a fertile region and not the northern deserts. We volunteers are thinking he’s trying to take a chance to boot out the rebels in the southern forests and resettle them with imported Haitians. Honestly, I will never understand the man.)

Whatever his true motives are, I rather like the idea. As several bloggers have pointed out, the United States certainly could afford to let some more Haitian earthquake survivors into the country (And take a look at immigration policies in general, while they’re at it).

Suburban ghettoes.

Today, the Sun reported that the “majority of the poor in the Baltimore region now live in the city’s suburbs.” This trend has existed for a while, and it fits my experience in Chicago, DC, and Baltimore–take your mass transit system of choice out towards the suburbs during rush hour, and the further you go, the higher the proportion of scuffed-up passengers gets. It also should be a reminder that a) major demographic shifts can happen pretty quickly, and b) a lot of these suburbs don’t have much of a safety net or many local jobs, having largely sprouted up as bedroom communities.

It also underscores the need for effective regional mass transit, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

And of course, the news doesn’t change the fact that 23% of Baltimore’s 625,000-strong population fall below the poverty line, including over 30% of minors. So Baltimore still got problems.

The decline and fall.

As of this morning, I’m hugely pessimistic about the future of United States governance. Not specifically because Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat–Coakley’s misconduct as a prosecutor was staggering, and I couldn’t have voted for her under any circumstances–but because Senate Democrats are already folding like wet newspaper. In a chamber where Republican Party leaders actively condone the abuse and murder of prisoners and refuse to reduce the bloating national debt, the only hope for a government with a shred of decency and responsibility was that Congressional Democrats would come out swinging. Maybe Pelosi and Reid can keep their fractious party together, but it’s not looking good at the moment.

I don’t see any way this country can maintain its course. Senate Republicans have voted unanimously against every major piece of legislation, and can now filibuster everything they want. We have a non-functioning government, and I don’t see it getting any better in the future. This country is at the crumbling edge of a high cliff, and as Republicans stomp their feet with nihilistic determination, Senate Democrats are unwilling to band together and pull back from the brink.

As of this morning, I am convinced that I will see the United States collapse during my lifetime.

Of course.

It had to happen, I suppose.

Update: Nothing was stolen, not even my sunglasses sitting out in the center console. On a tangential note, I am disappointed with my Nexus One camera’s ultra-low-light shots.

Safe streets.

While discussing a (soon-to-be-revealed!) project with a friend, I suggested that she go explore the south side of Chicago by herself for a day. She demurred on grounds of safety, which is entirely reasonable, now that I think about it. It also made me wonder if my perception of danger has recalibrated itself in Baltimore.

Now, because I loved The Wire, I watched Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on the book of the same name and produced by Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns (synopsis: a Rolling Stone reporter embeds with a Marine unit during the Iraq War’s early stages. The original RS articles start here, and are worth a look). In one particular scene, the unit comes under fire. While the reporter huddles next to the side of a Humvee, one of the soldiers next to him says something along the lines of “Most people think Iraq is dangerous, but safety is all about context. If we were to stand up, we might be killed. But to us, behind this Humvee, Iraq is a safe place.”

About a month after we moved to our current house in east Baltimore, my girlfriend read the then-year-old story of Zach Sowers, a young, freshly-married Johns Hopkins financial analyst who lived a few blocks away. He was jumped by a group of teenagers who beat him into a coma, and he eventually died from his injuries. And during the last two weeks of December 2009, there were six seven robberies, eight aggravated assaults, and two stolen vehicles within a half-mile radius of my house.

But to us, on our block, Baltimore is a safe place.