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Franklin Avenue Going Downhill?


grock

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Small communities and enclaves can make those types of inroads relatively quickly by supporting each other. I am absolutely not trying to take anything at all away from anyone who works hard towards their goals and attains them. However, truth be told, places where there are many more Mexicans living in areas rife with social pathology do not have all rosey stories to tell. Quite the opposite. When you have a large isolated disenfranchised community it's a breeding ground for apathy and all other forms of social pathology regardless of race or national origin.

It actually demostrates that people with very similar backgrounds/ethnicities can have very different experiences in America just by choosing to move to a small community in Danbury vs a large community in L.A. or TX. Now those Mexicans who stay in Danbury will have given their children a much better chance at the American Dream vs. those who end up in L.A. or TX, but it deoesn't mean one group is better than the other, just better off by the virtue of geography.

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I'm tired of excuses being made for individuals who lack basic personal responsibility. Its not the fault of society because you can't responsibly discard trash, not use foul language, resist the urge to rob someone because you need $20 and don't feel like getting a job, etc... There is a "I don't give a f***" culture that has grown out of the inner city that many young people view as cool and this is the problem. It is a cultural thing that is sold every day through television and music. It is a shame because the vast majority of people who live in the inner city ARE responsible hard working people who are looking for a better way of life. Its a few bad apples who ruin things for everyone, and they ruin it in a big way. I live in the Asylum Hill neighborhood and spend much of my time in the South End and I see it every day. Franklin Avenue was NOT the way it is now 15-20 years ago.

I know someone who owns an apartment building in the South Green neighborhood and they have a rat problem because tenants just throw trash out their windows instead of walking it to the dumpster.

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Are you kidding me!

Some examples in my family alone.

Current mother in-law. Didn't graduate high school till her late 20's. Went to college (While having a 6 year old) and got a "ground floor" job with the state. Worked her way into a very nice "upper management" position and is now retired. Husband with only high school education set a goal and worked his ass off as a general laborer at a local public works, he is now the director of PW.

They played real estate investments right etc and now have a half million dollar home purchased without a mortgage, a beach house in Clinton, a home in Vermont for Winter skiiing etc. They are going very well.

My exwife. Started at a mortgage company through a temp agency soon after we got married. Is now reporting to the second down from the CEO in a very good high paying position after working her way through customer service, to supervisor positions etc. It's a very large company with locations around the country. Last I heard she was sent to be COO of their Atlanta branch.

I took a 10K investment 3.5 years ago and turned it into a 7 figure specialty manufacturing company with product in 17 countries...I aint fully "there" yet but not doing so bad either.

Current wife. Started as a $8 an hour day care worker in her teens. Is now a director of a large child care center in Glastonbury pushing high 5 figures after going to night school for almost 10 years to get her degree.

Those are real examples just from my family. This is America. We have opportunity only limited by your mind and willingness to believe in what you can accomplish through hard work.

If you sit back and beotch about how life sucks - it will.

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Did everybody miss my point that the immigrant success stories are pre-World War II or POST race-riots of the 60s? So, I agree with these two posts, which make my point that our highly disenfranchised minority communities are comprised mainly of those groups who were forced to come to America against their will or who came, voluntarily, during the immediate (and ephemeral) post World War II boom. These groups feel--rightly--that their ranks should include the most prosperous among us and do not view themselves, as post-1960s immigrants do, in comparison to the "old world" that they left behind. I guess, a dumbed-down way to put it is that recent black African immigrants don't have a chip on their shoulder ... because their ancestors weren't dragged here against their will! No wonder black Americans, whose ancestors arrived--as slaves--well before most of ours, feel differently about their place at the table than recent immigrants who made the choice to come here. So everything is relative, and when one says, well I know this guy who's a minority who is doing "quite well for himself," think about what "quite well for himself" actually means, and whether you would consider his station in life quite well for yourself? I doubt it; so, again, I don't think it's quite right to apply that standard--and to say that our model of hard work and achievement seems to be working, so what's wrong?--to the black community. We're not talking about folks that have been here a generation; we're talking about folks who have been here since the Declaration of Independence, and it's not surprising that they're angry we white people think that all it takes is a little hard work and a positive attitude. Just saying.
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Feelin ain't getting. You can't hope your way into prosperity. You need to roll up your sleeves, and put some blood sweat and tears in order to get there.

Of course everything is relative. If someone came over here with nothing, and in one generation he is making $30K a year, that is a success story. He is a failure in your eyes as much as you are a failure if we measure you against Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. You measure success by where he came from, not by some arbitrary standard you decided to set for him.

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No one disputes that. We all understand that people are dealt a hand that they have to play. If that involves playing catch up to the rest of society because your parents were dealt a bad hand and did not play it right, that is what your life involves. You have to do what it takes to get where you want and understand that it might take a lot of work just to get to where most people consider normal or were born into. I understand that and it's easy for me to say because I've never known what it's like to be disadvantaged. We're just having a discussion here and shedding light onto why it's more difficult for some people or groups of people (an off topic discussion that I'll be moving soon). The psycological condition of people needs to be taken into account as it's the number 1 reason why people don't succeed in my opinion. If you are raised by despondant, depressed, and broken spirited parents you will most likely internalize some if not all of that negative sentiment. The damage will be done and is irreversible. There are societal causes to why certain segments of society have a harder time than others and there are certainly personal causes to why certain individuals don't perform at the same level.
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Of course it is tougher if you were born into a rotten environment. And like you said, you have to try that much harder just to catch up. However, it is not impossible, and the damage is not irreversible. Ultimately if you decided to blame the society and everyone else for your misery you will not get anywhere. The only solution I can see is be responsible for yourself and work to get what you want. I just don't see how government social welfare and private charity can lift anyone out of poverty.
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Of course it is tougher if you were born into a rotten environment. And like you said, you have to try that much harder just to catch up. However, it is not impossible, and the damage is not irreversible. Ultimately if you decided to blame the society and everyone else for your misery you will not get anywhere. The only solution I can see is be responsible for yourself and work to get what you want. I just don't see how government social welfare and private charity can lift anyone out of poverty.
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I've never asked for nor received a hand out in my life. I've never qualified for any need based financial assistance and I know people from the burbs who have. I work with plenty of white folks from the burbs who have received far more hand outs from the government than me. So don't even start that. All I said was don't expect us to ever forget about that chapter of American history. It's not possible for us to do so, so you get over that!
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Dude I never had to get over because I was never part of it, nor were other members here on this board. I'm not disputing the fact that slavery was horrible, because it certainly it was. But it should not be used as an excuse to avoid personal responseability. Plus my ancestors were not even part of the slave trade, so why should I have to pay? The people in the burbs are no exception either......
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Ha Ha!!! You should really take your own advice.... But anyways I'm not here to flame you. I'm not ignorant and despite the hardships people face in the inner cities there's still plenty of opportunity for people to excel in this country. I just don't buy into the victomhood arguement anymore, maybe I did before. Personal responsability needs to be taught not victomhood, so go ahead and call me ignorant and flame me if you want just because I don't agree with you. So flame away!!!!
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I think Franklin Ave. has declined a bit in the last 5 years even, I wasn't a great fan of it, except for the giant grinder shops, so I'm not very sad. Little Italy for better or worse is on its way to become little insert South American or Eastern European country.

I'm going to stay away from the from all the the debate involving economic mobility and simply add statisticaly the American dream is dead if it ever existed. I also beleive many people are confusing economic and social mobility, I personally believe the ability to change your socio economic was harder in the past, which is saying alot because its almost impossible now.

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Well, I agree that social welfare and private charity can't lift anybody out of poverty. They should constitute a last-resort social safety net to provide for the most basic needs of those who are without any resources. However, I think where this whole conversation began was with a statement that Franklin Avenue is deteriorating because Hartford's residents are slobs, which garnered a number of responses blaming said slob culture on a lack of education and a wealth of poverty. (Oxymoronic, I know.) One of our posters pegged these problems on "morals and family upbringing."

I think that's true, and I think a lot of us would agree. But I posed the questions: "[H]ow did we get where we are? Where did those morals and family upbringing go? If we took one misbhaving 17 year-old kid in Hartford and traced his geneology, where would we find the breakdown and why?" I don't blame a lack of "government social welfare and private charity," but I do blame a lack of national values, which has fueled our abandonment of the public realm and driven those with means directly to cul-de-sacs in isolated suburbs without any care or concern for the less fortunate inhabitants of our once-great cities.

It is naive and self-serving to wag one's finger at somebody and say "be responsible for yourself and work to get what you want" when society and time have conspired to create the very "rotten environment" you note that it's tougher to overcome. And yes, those who do overcome may be better for it, and will have embraced the rugged individualist spirit of our great land, but what angers me is the attitude I hear time and time again absolving society of any responsibility for the rotten environment. It's like it's just a fact of nature, but it's not. Urban decay is a product of something, namely, a series of bad decisions by greedy people. But America can do no wrong, so whatever happened must have happened for good reason--that or it was the free market, or both--so God willed that rotten environment to exist and there but by the Grace of God go I and God bless America and its superhighways.

But I digress.

The point is this. Why can't we adopt a two-pronged approach? (1) Believe, as it is firmly true, that personal responsibility and hard-work are essential tools for a prosperous life and (2) acknowledge that how we structure society will affect the probable success of personal responsibility and hardwork--and whether those values are passed along to future generations--and so we should take some responsibility as a nation. When you've jailed more people than the USSR, you've got a problem.

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Bevis, at least make a little bit more of an effort to spell check when you are spewing this ignorance. YOU are not the one paying. The whole point here is that history matters. Generations of people who grew up without any rights/money/inheritance/equity is not nothing. We have had the opportunity to fix our race-based societal mistakes for a long time, but we have not seriously chosen to do so. We have made racial discrimination illegal and pretended that everyone starts on an equal playing field. We have certainly made progress towards equality in this country, but the scars of decades of racist policies still remain, mostly because we say they do not exist. This is not about you.

I agree that personal responsibility is important. But unless you grew up or spent considerable time in the ghetto (yes, the true meaning of the word), you have no credentials to be preaching this to people who did. We as a society need to start looking seriously at this dirty little American secret- that black and Latino children in low-income urban neighborhoods still grow up seeing no economic opportunity for themselves, that their schools stink and are expected to, and that we respond to the violence and drug activity in their neighborhoods by steering clear of them. When we start recognizing these problems, we will have taken some personal responsibility.

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How do you explain the fact that up until the 60's America had legal ways of doing just that? My father was not allowed the same opportunities as whites growing up in Virginia in the 50's. He couldn't go to school with them, eat with them, socialize with them, ect. It was all ILLEGAL. That's a fact. So I don't think this statement holds any water. Whites threatened elementary school aged black kids with death for attempting to integrate. This was less than 50 years ago, one generation ago. It's a lot more than pure speculation that some citizens of America were systematically excluded from being full participants in society based on ethnicity/race alone, it's a fact plain and simple. An ugly one, but one that we cannot lose sight of.
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Fair enough. Racism and discrimination exists, even today. No doubt about it. Every minority group in the US experienced it. Be you black, Hispanic, Asian, Italian, Irish, Jew, Muslim, Hindu....only opportunity available to the discriminated class is work. Those willing to work their butts off were able to ascend from poverty. Those who are not willing to do so, will stay poor. You simply cannot forever carry on about the injustice of the society and therefore do nothing to help yourself. Back in the 1800s if you were Chinese in the West, you really had it bad. Railroad workers were in effect slaves. They were beaten and lynched - no different than if they were blacks in the South. If today their descendants are asking for preferential treatment from the society. I would tell them the same thing. Go get a job you bum.
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How does the society conspires to keep certain people in perpetual poverty? I am not talking about black or PR. Your theory that capitalist white conspired to keep black and PR down is pure speculation. If you look at homogeneous society such as Japan, poverty exist over there too. In a free market economy it is not in the best interest of the capitalist or the ruling elite - depending on your political persuasion, to keep 15%(?) of the population out of the economic market. If anything it is in their self interest that all are self sufficient so that 1) capitalists don't have to pay for social welfare, and 2) all can buy the goods and services these capitalists sell.
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Not that I want this to turn into a debate on Affirmative Action, however the idea of Affirmative Action is not to give less qualified minority persons a job in employment decisions over more qualified white candidates, it's more like with all things being equal for two candidates deciding to go with someone who will increase diversity in your workplace.
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More then not I've been in agreement with your posts in this thread. How it got turned into a race thing anyway I'm not sure...but anyhow.

The chances of two identical candidates going for the same job is near impossible unless we are cloning people. Personality has every bit as much of influence as a degree during an interview for instance. Affirmative action IMO is reverse discrimination. How about we just choose the candidate that fits the job best, regardless of color. Sounds simple and maybe it really is.

Being told I *have* to hire a minority over a non minority with "equal" qualifications is a form of government sponsored discrimination in my view. I'm going to hire the best person for the job. Period. If that person is Latino, so be it. If that person is Black, so be it. If that person is white, so be it. No government body is going to take that right away from me.

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I didn't mean to stir up a hornet's nest by mentioning affirmative action, and suffice it to say, reasonable minds can disagree about that. I mentioned it only to clarify my position that I, personally, was not appealing to "preferential treatment," however it is defined, but rather a systemic change in the way we approach our cities and their inhabitants.

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1. I am not supporting so-called "preferential" treatment. I can't speak for Tycoon regarding affirmative action, but I am absolutely opposed to the notion of hiring anybody based on his race.

2. What I am saying by society creating the rotten environment is that, first, as Tycoon points out, we had express systemic racism less than 50 years ago and, second, our behavior since, while not expressly discriminatory, has made the situation worse. To wit: zoning and drugs laws as well as government subsidies for the suburbanization of the United States. We have imposed segregation by locking minorities in city centers. Of course, the answer is, work your tail off and you can succeed, and that is no doubt true, but we have put in place every possible hurdle to make success improbable.

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