Buildings and Things that Matter

The Philadelphia Inquirer has removed its top editor over a column he approved entitled "Buildings Matter, Too." You can still read the column, but it now has an eleven word headline.
Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?...

“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.
Indeed the damage in multiple cities is evident already.

She had a good point, the column's author, and the editor did his job by selecting the piece for publication and drawing attention to it with a punchy headline. In today's atmosphere, however, that's enough to have ended his career.

UPDATE: The Cultural Revolution continues, this time at NYT.

2 comments:

Eric Blair said...

The Inquirer has been a trash newspaper for a long time. Perhaps this will hasten a well deserved demise.

ymarsakar said...

Old humanity is not going to hold power for long enough for there to be another Maoist Cultural Revolution. THe Cabal leaders know this via their Looking GLass technology. It is why they are panicking, probably for the first time in a very long era.

Now humanity's true leaders understand, for the first time, what it is like to be cattle under the system of an unviolable power structure. Haha.