Go read the rest here.It's simple: anyone who is considering the possibility of moving to Memphis, but doesn't know a whole lot about the city, is going to discover some incredibly nasty diatribes against the place as soon as they start looking. It will almost certainly completely change them from agnostic about Memphis to hellbent against setting foot in Memphis. And it's not a bunch of snobs from the coasts giving Memphis a terrible reputation. It's people who live in Memphis and can't stop shitting all over their own city. Obviously, I'm often very critical of Memphis,
but I sincerely hope there is a difference between critique and animosity.
Critique is fine, critique is welcome - when it comes from an attachment to the city and a desire for improvement. But sheer unmitigated animosity is killing the city.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Really nice post from fearlessvk
Fearlessvk shows how, sadly, it takes a transplant to show how wonderful a place Memphis is and can be...
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3 comments:
When the shit is piling up faster than you can shovel it, you get out of the way.
The kind of "sheer unmitigated animosity" that is killing the city is the kind that has made me and mine victims of crime four times the lase three years or so, and made my neighbors similar victims many times over.
Unless you're a rapper or a thug, this is no place to invest your future in.
Somebody call the hyperbole police, a crime's been committed here.
Sorry to hear about your troubles mute, but as a guy raising a happy family on the northside, I think there's room for some daisy's and kitty cats amid the thugs.
And I'm not sure what's so wrong with rappers. The ones I know are lovely, talented people.
Crime is a problem in Memphis, no question, no doubt. It's also a problem in New Orleans and Baltimore and Washington D.C. and Oakland, CA and St. Louis - and you don't find the same level of nearly ubiquitous self-hatred in any of these places. You find some of it in some quarters, of course, but it doesn't come close to the soul-destroying inferiority complex that Memphis suffers from. So I don't think crime fully explains the problem.
BTW, not everyone has a choice about where they can invest their future. (If I had a completely unconstrained choice, I wouldn't be in Memphis now...but I still have far more choice than many.) For those who have no choice but to reside in Memphis, at least for the foreseeable future, the kind of attitude you preach leads precisely to the kind of hopelessness and nihilism that only buttresses Memphis' real problems with crime. It's what Cornel West has written so beautifully about again and again.
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