Tuesday, October 02, 2007

More scenes from 'America's next great city'


Down in Baton Rouge, La., Mayor-President Melvin "Kip" Holden is fond of saying he presides over "America's next great city."

I'm from there. I love the place. I want the PR hype to be true.

THE PHOTO ABOVE shows the revitalized kind of place the good mayor wants the rest of America -- and the world -- to see. Indeed, downtown has made amazing progress since my wife and I moved away in 1988 -- never would I have thought Third Street again would be this hoppin' on a Friday night.

But to live up to the hype of "America's next great city," you need more than a rebounding downtown and big crowds for a free concert and Abita Beer pub crawl. To be "America's next great city," you need an educated populace.

You need to care about your kids, and that means giving them better places to learn than what you give Fido (or Phideaux, as the case may be) to sleep.

These pictures belie the "great city" hype. These are more pictures of my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School. These pictures do not reflect a great city.

These pictures reflect Mogadishu, or something equally wretched. These are pictures of how a local school board refuses to perform even basic, routine maintenance on a grand old building -- a grand old building filled with the city's best and brightest teen-agers -- and lets it rot until it falls apart.

With the city's children within its crumbling walls.

Great cities don't stand still for this kind of outrage. Great cities' boards of education don't neglect a venerable and acclaimed school until it molders in Third World squalor.

Great cities' school boards don't then have public panic attacks, wondering whether the whole thing just ought to be torn down, when the evidence against them becomes damning and blatant.

See, that's what you call destroying evidence of the crime.

NO, GREAT CITIES don't put up with crap like that when its children's lives and futures are at stake. And great cities don't go around tearing down giant pieces of its history when they can do better than that.
They don't. They. Just. Don't.

I want my hometown to be a great city. Sadly, I see little in the Baton Rouge Magnet High fiasco to bolster my confidence that it will be someday.



No comments: