DETROIT — I know an old woman (click here) who hasn’t opened her windows in a decade, afraid that what’s outside will climb inside. Inside, there is the stale odor of dead air.
I know another woman who called me about a corpse lying outside her window for six and a half hours. This was because of cutbacks at the morgue. No dignity in death here. They do it better in Baghdad.
I know of an 11-year-old boy who was shot, the bullet going clean through his arm. The cops rushed him to the hospital. There was no ambulance available. About two-thirds of the city’s fleet is broken on an average day.
I know a cop who drives around in a squad car with holes in the floorboards. There is no computer, no air-conditioning and the odometer reading is 147,000 miles. His bulletproof vest has expired. His pay has been cut 10 percent.
I knew a firefighter who died in a fire, but not from the fire. He died when the roof of an abandoned house collapsed on him and his brethren could not find him because his homing alarm was broken and did not sound. He suffocated.
In our town, the 911 dispatch system recently went down for 15 hours, and no one seemed to give a damn. When the system is running, the average wait is 58 minutes.
If this were New York, these stories would have ricocheted around the world. But this is Detroit, and nobody gives a damn. Even here people have been conditioned to accept these things as normal. This numbness, in a peculiar way, is a sign of strength. People here manage to get along somehow....
