Shorter Esmonde
While animal cruelty gets loads of column space and talk-radio time, human-on-human violence generally registers a shrug and a segue into which teenager the local sports franchise is going to shower with millions of dollars for throwing a ball or smacking a disc with a stick.
Last year, 50 people were homicide victis in Buffalo. Hoskins was convicted of 52 counts of animal cruelty. Those animals lived.
Like Esmonde’s other love, preservation (and, now, tea party politics), the local fascination with animal cruelty cases is built upon a mountain of white privilege. Esmonde is its weakest cheerleader – a pathetic, aging parrot of lazy WBEN topics.
That’s today’s edition of Donn Esmonde is an Ass™.
Alan, normally your posts make a lot of sense, but when I saw this line …
> built upon a mountain of white privilege
… all I thought was “Tumblr seems to be leaking again.”
Really, you can do better than to resort to the gender studies-inspired argot and cliches of social justice warriors.
Donn Esmonde’s column is a parody of “Stuff White People Like”.
Stuff white people like:
– Lily white suburbs far away from the brown people
– highways cut through city parks so they can speed past the brown people on the way to the hockey game
– parking lots right next to the door in case a brown person gets too close
Actually, more like href=”http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/20/71-being-the-only-white-person-around/”>being the only white person around is something white people like, but not in the way you envision. White people also like diversity, living near the water, knowing what’s best for poor people, gentrification, architecture, and being offended.
Given the repeated use of “authenticity” among many of the items at that website, many of them appear to be a table of contents for a week’s worth of Buffalo Rising posts or Donn Esmonde columns.
But I’m more fascinated with the reverse suburbanization that Rocco Termini envisions with his plan to turn a former supermarket warehouse into a warehouse for homeless people, thus (a) freeing up a sweet downtown parcel near the BNMC; and (b) moving some of the riff-raff out of the BNMC corridor and out to Larkinville, off the beaten path.
Well, except for the poor schmucks who live in these homes.
Imagine the outrage and teabag sign parades that would pop up if Rocco dared suggest such a project in Clarence. The horror!
Clarence has no massive A&P warehouses of which I’m aware.
Oh yea, That is the only reason this could not be done in Clarance. Well what if Rocco proposed a new building then? Do you think the good people of Clarance would embrace it then?
Probably not, as it would be violative of the town’s zoning ordinances and the recently passed multifamily ordinance.
On the other hand, I suspect that the putative residents wouldn’t want to be so far out in the stix.
But your silence = acceptance of the fact that this amounts to developers shunting a problem out of downtown / BNMC corridor and out beyond the outer fringes of what could possibly be considered to be “downtown Buffalo”.
There are many many problems with the City Mission move, one such example being transit access to Larkin. Or how about all the other services usually required by our homeless or destitute Buffalonians?How is moving them *away* from those services and the links required to get there a good idea?
Exactly. Ask Steele.
Well I just looked it up and it seems 4 Metro Bus lines run either within a few blocks of this building or directly by it.
Now I have not actually offered my opinion on the appropriateness of this site other than to say it is 6 of this and half dozen of that. Not a substantive difference. It reuses existing buildings and infrastructure and generates new investment – good. It concentrates poverty-bad. But that is what we have the city for, right?
Not sure why this project is garnering so much concern from Bedenko other than he hates anyone who won’t pay enough attention to the plight of the Clarence schools which somehow is transformed into an irrational hatred of preservation of historic buildings cloaked in a faux concern for inner city people who are supposedly being harmed by white people i living in the city who promote investment in new infrastructure for poor people.
It’s an interesting irony given your penchant for referring to the city of Buffalo as a “warehouse” for the region’s poor.
Oh that’s right, your town already outlawed this kind of project. You must be proud of that. Maybe Buffalo should be smart enough to do the same thing. Silly Buffalo. Can you imagine the teabagers storming town hall if the school budget had to pay for homeless kids?
As for the location of the shelter. Other than the slightly lower level of public transit I fail to see the difference. This location can hardly be described as hidden or remote. There are reams of new houses in the area as you pointed out. A major new office project is planned for directly across the street and just a few blocks away is the major development in Larkin. You can literally walk to Main Street in downtown from here in 15-20 minutes.
Clarence and Buffalo are the same? A semi-rural exurb with a “right to farm” law should be identical to a city? That seems strange.
But you’re right. A “15 – 20 minute” walk to Main Street from that location to downtown is totally better than actually being in downtown.
What does that have to do with housing homeless people I think Clarence would be a great place for these poor people to live. These homeless children deserve to be educated in the 2nd best school system – don’t you think? Or is it third best now. Probably would sink to 4th or 5th if you let these kids of lazy welfare cheats in. What do you think would Clarence be open to hosting a homeless shelter?
We don’t have many homeless.
Wow! Your town must be populated by a superior race of beings.- or is it that you send your problem people to Buffalo?
What are “problem people”, exactly?
I hate to disagree, but I have to. I don’t use a car for transport and even a 5 minute walk in Dec-Mar temperatures is brutal by foot or by bike. I’m not homeless, but for our fellow Buffalonians who may already be forced to spend a large portion of their time outside during the day (and sometimes night), forcing them to walk down Seneca or Swan at certain points of the year for 15-20 minutes is pretty inhumane.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the A+P project is awesome. I just don’t think the location is a best fit for the City Mission. The decision doesn’t appear to be client-focused in any way. Of course, I always concede that I’m probably missing big details.
Then again, I suppose we could instead put a parking lot on that site and then we can pretend that the homeless drunks and crazy men don’t exist anymore. But, just make sure the parking is close to the door of your destination just in case the magical thinking does not work.
Moving them from BNMC is precisely what’s being done. But because it’s (a) within city limits and (b) being done by a group of people you like, it’s perfectly reasonable.
The modus operandi of any local news outlet is to engender outrage,
because that guarantees ratings and website visits. And the sad reality
is that white suburbanites get a lot more broken up over animal cruelty
than the murder of an inner city teenager, which gets consigned to the
“gang-related” bin of forgotten crimes.
The surest way to get on the BuffaloPundit excrement list for evuh is to give voice to, and consideration to, the opinion of the 58% of Clarence voters who choked on a 10% school tax hike.
Esmonde did that, and the rest is “saecula saeculorum”.
@hwhamlin:disqus — It’s a rubber arrow in the quiver to attack Alan with Clarence. Seen it done for years, and nobody made any substantive inroads with it. If that’s all ya got, keep that gun in the leather.
For my reasons (religious practice), I have come much more in common with working with the poor over the last 3 years. And it doesn’t matter whether they’re urban or not. Come down south and you’ll find both rural and big city poor.
Sure, but there’s no sense in beating or mistreating an animal. But as Alan pointed out, there are many among us who have not been as fortunate or blessed, whichever label you care to use. Spend some time volunteering to help them and you’ll find out quickly they’re no different than you. When I realized that the “Teabag and Sugar Sunday” I organized at my Parish for a soup kitchen resulted in what is for many, the only cold drink they get all day, where 95-100 degree weather with 90% humidity is common for 5 months of the year, such can alter your viewpoint.
Pictures of neglected and mistreated animals breaks anyone’s heart. How many turn away from their fellow humans in the same condition is amazing.
I’ve been a pain in Alan’s tail over the years. I feel regret knowing the preservationists have him in the cross-hairs.
Well, it’s more of a case of “If you disagree with me, you’re an ass.” With a subtext (not applicable to Esmonde) of “If you’re a Republican, you’re an ass.”
And be careful about “Teabag” anything–especially at church.
Alan’s gripe, apparently, is than Donn didn’t write about what Alan wanted Donn to write about today.
That used to be his gripe about Mary Kunz Goldman’s “Buzz” column. Until Mary actually turned out to be good-natured about the weekly diatribe.