Survival

Is survival a relative concept? 

What do you mean, a relative concept?

Well, is survival defined the same in the Hamptons as it is along Grand Boulevard in Detroit?

Uh, now that you put it that way – yes, survival is very relative.

What, then, would survival look like in Detroit?

What do you mean?

Well, would survival mean continuation of a refugee camp style existence for the next 10 years?   20 years?

Don’t think so.  Not too many folk think that living standards in the good old US of A involve lengthy periods of “refugee camp” living standards.

Okay, so what would survival for Detroit look like?

Well just go back a hundred years or so.  Detroit was flooded with uneducated, unskilled, in many cases unemployable immigrants and minorities – refuges from Europe and the southern states who came to Detroit to work.  Not all that different from what it looks like today.  Yet, there were jobs.  There was business – automobiles.  Stores.  Services. 

You mean they would hire these folks with not much on their resumes?

Of course, they trained them – taught them what they were to do, how to do it, how quickly to do it.  They told them where  to show up, when to show up and what was expected of them.  They paid them a “living wage” and those who put some extra oomph into their jobs actually got promoted, earned more, sent their kids to college, and, as they like to say, the rest is history.

So, you think that can happen again?

Of course it can.  But.

What do you mean, “But?”

But for the following:

·         UAW, AFL-CIO, SEIU, AFT, NEA, AFSCME and hundreds more like them

·         Minimum wage laws, affirmative action laws, Lily Ledbetter laws, handicap laws, environmental laws, affordable health care laws, and hundreds more like them

So, you think survival is defined as a turn back – away from all the progress brought us by the unions and the laws and the rules and the bureaucracies behind all that good stuff they tell us they do for us.

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.   Yes, you just nailed it.  You just defined survival.  What works in the Hamptons, doesn’t work in Detroit.  Open up Detroit and the people will flock to it – keep treating it like the Hamptons and it will never be the Hamptons.

It ain’t that simple.

Oh, yes it is.  Build a moratorium on the unions, special interests and all their laws and rules – limit it just to Detroit – and they will come – they will come in droves – it will make the great migration of the early 20^th century look like the line waiting outside to get in to the new “Lone Ranger” movie.  Heck, let Axelrod/Barack take credit for the idea.