C(h)ity Sidewalks

Hey!! Hey!!! You crack Mutherfacka neegar biatch!! Yeah that's riaght you!

Yep, you guess correctly if you said this scene was some chickie from da hood having a heated argument with her baby fadda on the street at lunchtime. Stepping out onto the sidewalk from my place of employement located in the slumbs of downtown can be, to paraphase Bilbo Baggins, "A dangerous business".

Now I consider myself as adventurous as the next person , but I really have no desire to witness some of the things I have during the short time I have been in this craphole of a location.

Once upon a time, most of the government offices were located in a safe quiet location on a building campus with lots of parking which was owned by the government (oops, I did mean TAXPAYERS really!). But then the government decided that this campus was too nice and that they must sell it to some crony of a politician's large corporation for a pittance as an incentive for the company to move here to our wonderful state. And so the campus was sold, but not before the government poured large amount of taxpayer's money into fixing up all the sidewalks and roads and landscaping on this large campus... I guess the tax breaks and the fact that the large corporation was buying the property for a fraction of its value wasn't good enough... so on the sly the good old politician's fixed all the things on the property that we government workers had not seen repaired in 10+ years just before handing over the property to their pals - at our expense. Nice!

Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of government workers who had previously worked on this campus, had to be relocated... but where? Again, the politicians came up with another great scheme.

Most of the cities in this area are horrible. They are nothing more than glamourized slums. There is little in the way of culture or attractions that would make most people want to risk their lives travelling through the slums to bother coming to any of these small pitiful local cities. Therefore, the government, which is constantly pouring more tax money into 'urban rivitalization' projects for the sole purpose of patting themselves on the back and pandering to low income people that live in those areas, had the wonderful idea to move all the government offices to these areas.

Now, we are all unwilling hostages basically from 9am-5pm monday through Friday. It is funny to see the "government worker" traffic. In the morning hours you see an influ of fairly late model cars containing middle class type looking people driving through these slums. Scenic view out the window of the commute generally includes a homeless person taking a leak on the wall of a dilapitated building or a crack momma screaming obscenities at her baby-fadda from the doorway of a building that looks like it should have been condemned five years ago. This is such a great situation for all of us that are forced to work in these areas. I'm sure that all the workers love it as much as me, as evidenced by the massive traffic snarls at 5pm caused by the government workers evacuating this shit hole city.

I'm sure us middle class folks are really helping to "revitalize" downtown business here... since most of us are afraid to even step out of our secured buildings at lunchtime. The sidewalks contain some messed up things here. I don't know what goes on in politicians heads when they do things like this. I think we should bus them in for the day and let them walk these sidewalks and see if they would want to work here themselves before they make decisions to force other people to do so.