There is an anti-pot commercial out there that just amazes me.
Typical “New York” ghetto scene. Three young black boys sitting on the steps of their apartment building….
There is a young girl signing this little jump rope song that borders on hip hop and she’s
talking about how the three young boys won’t ever get out of the neighborhood if they don’t stop smoking weed….
It just blows me away sometimes thinking about the fact that we don’t talk about the elephant in our neighborhood. Instead of asking the deeper question: “Why do we have neighborhoods that our children want to leave?” we allow the people with the money to dominate the conversation with stupid commercials that mislead us into thinking that the drugs that kids are doing is the disease rather than the symptom of a deeper malaise that will not go away until we ensure that every child feels like he or she belongs and is cared for with love and respect. Children need to be a part of something. All people need community. This is why kids join gangs. It’s up to us to give them something better. It is up to us as a society to make America truly the land of opportunity for all.
Some might say the neighborhood’s going to ”pot” all because of the drugs but in fact it is because there is a profit to be made in flipping the neighborhood from rich to poor and back again. It’s a long process taking 10, 20, 30, 40 years sometimes to go from one state to the other. Keeping people on the edge and two paychecks away from foreclosure is just the way the systems works over the poorest and hardest working of Americans. It’s equity stripping and prevents the formation of solid neighborhoods where the turnover in housing is much much slower and much much less profitable to those developers who see nothing but the bottom line.
So… Like Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” This ”neighborhood flipping” as I call it is normally called gentrification. Instead, I point out the underlying foundations of disenfranchisement in which the developers, our electied officials and wealthy corporations play a major part. A disenfranchised population is beholden to corporations in a myriad of ways and often finds itself unable to protest the environmental damage going on because of the loss of jobs it would represent…. so the say. In reality, sustainable, or green building projects, are designed to be comfortable, solid, and lower the impact of the community upon the environment and stands the best chance at establishing a permanent community at the same time it guarantees good jobs for the community.
For a great example of this actually working you just need to check out Carlton Brown.
Sustainable community development is the name of his game.
It is estimated that implementing the changes we need to make in how we use and produce energy will create more jobs than have ever been created in the entire history of the industrial revolution. Three to Five million over the next ten years perhaps. This will actually be a new industrial revolution. Getting off the oil addiction will divert money that would normally go into Saudi pockets into domestic energy programs, skilled union wage jobs that won’t be easily outsourced, mass transit, local food security, solid education programs, all the while lowering our carbon footprint and lowering pollution in our neighborhoods.
It is not a choice between good jobs and the environment, we need both!
Anyone who gives up the environment for a job producing unsustainable products will
eventually have neither a healthy environment nor permanent employment.
It looks like Carlton Brown and Full Spectrum (A Sustainable Real Estate Development Company) are proving that it is not too expensive to save the earth!
David VanThournout
