Connect-i-cut

Firstly, to respond to Abigail's question - growing up in CT never allowed me to misspell the state name - we learned it as "If you Connect, I Cut." I don't know about Leah though. Today I thought about New Haven and Yale. Yale owns most of the property downtown as of now. Somebody told me that they liked the downtown because it is a lot safer than it used to be. Safer for who? The owners of the businesses downtown are mostly white, and are mostly upper class, which allows them to pay the sky-high rents that Yale charges. So all the folks that find downtown safe are probably white. Yale has done an excellent job at moving all the riff-raff and undesirable business to outlying areas like Fairhaven, the Hill, and Newhallville. Leah and I live on the border of Fairhaven and a half-mile up the road the buildings degrade, the businesses end, the streets fill up. How easily do we sequester ourselves from things we believe (true or not) to be unsafe? Why do we worry about a starving man in Fairhaven breaking into a car because his family is hungry or because he hasn't worked in three years; or about a woman selling her body for the money to keep her children alive? Why not worry about the vultures who cry for oil in Saudi Arabia, or the robber barons who run what they believe are "honest businesses?" We can't sequester them. We think we need them and their services. We don't think we need people breaking into cars or selling their bodies. Maybe we do though. To remind us. I am talking to and about people like myself. White, upper-middle class, educated. The maintainers of the Status Quo. The ones who keep things the way they are because we are too afraid of what they might look like otherwise. God help us destroy ourselves. Or even just to remove that last part of our state, the "I Cut" part.