There’s not much good news in Missouri this holiday season. As the salvationists appear outside local businesses ringing their bells and the papers carry the usual stories of needy folk in line for help from local philanthropy, there’s a good deal else that suggests the coarseness of life in this place.
Towing scandal: The ringleaders of a crooked towing company, whose exposure triggered the resignation of a former St. Louis police chief and suggested a deep vein of corruption in the St. Louis police department, have all been given sweetheart sentences by a federal judge this week. Bill McClellan has written two columns about it, here, and here. As McClellan complains about one case, “Citizens have lost their cars, the city has been cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and the man supposedly behind all of this gets 10 months. Talk about throwing the pamphlet at a guy.”
Racism continues: To make matters worse, New census data have been released that appear to show that St. Louis “is among the most racially separated regions of the nation,” according to another Post-Dispatch story. John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, is quoted to the effect that these data “suggest that all the talk about a postracial society means nothing at the level of neighborhood.” In ethnically mixed neighborhoods like my own, one is aware of racial hostility and suspicion, aware of racial gangs, aware that most reported crime is racially attributed. Racism is institutionalized in this city, as apparently in other cities in the nation’s so-called “ghetto belt.”
Institutional closings: And there’s bad news too for the institutionalized disabled all across Missouri, as the legislature debates closing all state facilities for the disabled and forcing patients into home care regardless of hardship. Of course many of these facilities were pretty dangerous places for their clients before budget cutting targeted them, but it looks as though Scrooge has the votes in Jeff City to close them now, as he usually does when it comes to harming the weak in this state. The cruelty of this thing is so flagrant that decent folk shouldn’t tolerate it. But I’ll bet they do. After all, we’re famous in Missouri for denying Medicaid to thousands of children and for resisting the new federal health care program.
We can’t afford care for the disabled in Missouri, and apparently we can’t afford safe highways any more, either; but the St. Louis Cardinals still think the city of St. Louis can afford to help them finance the dubious Ballpark Village. So as I wrap packages and try to think benevolent thoughts this year, I think I’ll increase my disability insurance and forget about those baseball games I’d like to attend next summer: that, and stay off the roads in bad weather.
—which is what I’m doing today.