Suburbaneisenhowereraville

That lovely little gem comes from a blog that points out the problems with my university's school paper. It is called the Anti-Lantern, and this is going to be this guy's last post for awhile. The subject of today's rant is about a student who wrote an article about his "harrowing" experience of being dropped off in the middle of downtown Columbus. To give you a little perspective, downtown Columbus is the size of a postage stamp, and there are so few blacks who live in town that I usually joke that "there ain't but 5 of us here." The assertions the original author makes are wholly and completely insensitive to different races, and the fact that it got published really hurts my head. The purpose of Anti-Lantern is to pick apart articles for grammatical, factual, and spelling errors, giving the reader a play-by-play of how horrible the articles (in particular, opinion articles) are written. The author of this blog wants to write for the paper in the hopes to improve things, so he's going to be giving up the blog to someone else (if a replacement can be found) when he takes the journalism class for the paper in the fall. He's written some really insightful and hilarious comments, and this was just priceless if, for nothing else, my new favorite word: Suburbaneisenhowereraville.

Keep in mind that I grew up on the "mean streets" of Cleveland where we have no bars on our doors (and the window ones are decorative), and locking doors just makes sense. There have been door locks since the invention of the door, so why people keep their crap-shacks unlocked is beyond me (OK, so crap-shack might be a bit harsh). My family still lives on the "dangerous" East Side (so called because that's where the blacks live; the city is still horribly, racially divided) within walking distance of the Cultural Gardens, the Botanical Garden, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and other museums and art and music colleges. The neighborhood is on the National Register, and the house I grew up in is one of three that were commissioned by Rockefeller. I get really defensive when people bash city dwellers in general (and Cleveland in particular; it will always be home), so the idea that some suburbanite kid spent 27 minutes in "the ghetto" (which was not nearly as bad as the Projects of various big cities) and acts like he was living out a scene from "Menace 2 Society" is irritating.

What a punk.