Roof with hole in Cleveland

Submitted by Jeff Buster on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 07:47.
Roof with hole in Cleveland

If you drive around Cleveland – or other NEO communities which do not have point of sale inspections – you will see houses and commercial buildings with colored tarps strapped/tacked to their roofs.   Often the tarps are the popular blue ones – which really aren’t waterproof because they are merely woven plastic thread.  
 
You see these blue tarps on houses which are occupied.   Families are in the house with the blue tarp up on the roof waving in the wind.
 
I see these tarps like the white flags used in warfare to announce “SURRENDER”.   
 
The tarps are telling everyone ”I surrender” – I can’t afford to fix my roof.  I only  have enough  money for a blue tarp.
 
Every day the blue tarp offers the community the same urgent message: I HAVE SURRENDERED!
 
But no one comes to help. 
 
The City doesn’t recognize the blue tarp and offer any financial help.  
 
The neighbors have their own urgent problems.   
 
The Feds are too far away to see the tarp.
 
But WE can see the tarps – everyday, on street after street in Cleveland – and WE do nothing too.   
 
We have all surrendered.  
 

 

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100 Abandoned Houses In Detroit

Submitted by Charles Frost on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 21:31.

Number 37:

From: http://www.100abandonedhouses.com/

By refusing to deal honorably with others, you dishonor yourself.

abandoned home

Submitted by Susan Miller on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 22:14.

Americans drank the koolaid of capitalism and it sucked them (us) right out of home. HOME not house.

Imagine the stories these walls could tell. Stories of birth and death and celebration and learning and growing, working, fighting on foreign soil, aging, many generations, food smells, the sounds of peaceful sleeping and sleep fraught with terror. This is the real terror, that we have abandoned home. We are the great uncommitted.

Now, commit to that idea for a few moments. Ponder it and all it's magnitude.

I am going to bed now. I'll dream of these empty abandoned homes,  dream of where the people who once enlivened them are now.

Thank you Bill for this poignant reminder of our inability to commit to relationships, neighbors, community, even family. Phew... to bed.