Money alone solves nothing and poverty can’t be solved with money. Any drug dealer or upstanding organized crime lord could raise their hands to that. The problem is poverty is a cancer. Breast cancer alone doesn’t kill the patient. It’s what it becomes when it spreads into the body. Let it go too long and you’ll never be rid of it.

Communities need money to make changes, yes, but they need leadership and attention. No one deals drugs on Main Street. Crime thrives most where you’re not looking and poverty feeds the crime.

People stop caring. Motivation is what drives human beings. If the motivation to make minimum wage at the 7/11 that will likely be held up while going home to a place where drugs are dealt on the front porches you can see how apathy is paramount. This is just an example too. There are hundreds of stories like this. It’s a cycle that has to be broken and it can’t be broken without support and the kind of media attention that currently only Lindsay Lohan commands.

As for your main point -- I was surprised at the abysmal graduation rate. How fast is it falling? I thought I recalled that the Rochester school district had some of the highest paid teachers in the country. If that’s the case, 1) I understand that being at the top of a poor scale in the first place doesn’t mean much but 2) couldn’t that work against your argument if a nay-sayer got ahold of it -- “see -- even with high pay, they suck.”

A common factor in urban dumps -- like the one in which I reside -- is a loss of concern over “quality of life” issues. The so-called minor infractions are all overlooked with the excuse that the big crimes take up all of the attention. Drug dealer on your front porch? We’ll be there, after we attend to the shootings. THere are examples of cities who bucked that system and did address the Q of L issues and, lo and behold, crime rates fell. In Philly’s case -- there’s so much stupidity that they wouldn’t be able to read the reports, let alone act upon them.

I’m not familiar with Robert Zim’s “Stars” and will have to find a copy! There are other items I’ve lost over the years that I can’t find as well. I had a solar system map from the 70′s that hung on my wall since early childhood I wish I could find. My belief is it was probably purchased at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester but am not certain.

Great post! I encourage you to check out both my personal blog and my astronomy blog. I think you’ve hit on something that also struck me at a young age -- those “artist renditions.” In the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, the classic astronomy books (my favorite was “Stars” by Robert Zim) began receiving makeovers. Publishers removed this imaginative conceptions that evoked 1950′s science fiction and replaced them with actual pictures. I didn’t like that. In fact, when I bought the new edition of “Stars” I never used it, preferring the luscious colorful works of art to the rather stark reality from the NASA cameras.

I can’t even imagine what those beaches could end up looking like. I’m sick at the thought.

This thing’s gonna do some damage, but don’t discount how much drilling (and necessarily, spilling) has been done since 1932 when we started drilling in the Southern shores. It will be costly and may run businesses underground. But the town will come back.