The Detroit Facade

 The great mobile city. The car town. Mo-town. Madonna, Stevie Wonder, Eminem, The White Stripes, and even Kid Rock; Detroit used to be a fantastic star (like most of those celebs, ironically). Used to is a key phrase from here on out.

[For better close-ups of photos and links to more go to my blog at www.ezrajones.tumblr.com]

 Lansing (Michigan's capital) has been cracking down on education. By that I mean, laying teacher's off, closing public schools (the picture above is of a closed school's room filled to the tippy-top with trash) and cutting scholarships from programs like the MEAP for students. This is all good stuff for brighter and smarter kids taking over in this technologically savvy world, right? This is the solution. Piles of garbage. Now kids know school's important.

The importance of books... 

 

Most schools are worried about empty chairs. Kids not showing up for class. This one is worried about empty floorspace. Even the chairs are getting up and taking off.

 

I remember texting under my desk with my eyes off the board, sleeping in class and not copying down what was on the board...I wonder how many kids in Detroit schools always see this no matter what's on the chalkboard.

 It's not just the schools who are feeling the pain...

 A church that has less to worry about Satan than it does rain and chunks of cement.

 

 

The Kings Park Psychiatric Center (Asylum) as it falls apart by the seams. Covered, inside and out, with graffiti and vandalism, housing homeless drug addicts and thousands of bubonic rats, this institution is far from a healthcare provider.

Most of these old buildings don't really matter, do they? So what if Detroit's full of them. They don't kill people, do they? How bad can they be?

The next photo I'm posting is quite grotesque, so I'm warning you now.

 Gone unreported for months, possibly the majority of winter, a frozen, dead man is found halfway submerged in a lake of ice. Floating in trash, it's hard to find him...until you look.

How could this happen? A city this big couldn't possibly allow one of it's own to just rot and die in a corner...could it?

Detroit is in trouble. And no one is coming to help. Everyone's leaving.