Where do you live? Who lives around you? What are the racial/minority/woman ethics in your neighborhood? Is bigotry against those considered “less than” in this society tolerated in your neighborhood? Do you put your head in the sand and do nothing about it? Do you know what it means on a daily basis to live in a neighborhood and house which is ‘redlined’? Do you know what “redlined” means” Do you use a bank which practices such? Do you know if your bank practices such? Or other kinds of bigotry? Do you care? We will expose it all – at Chase Bank, for example! But that is for another day!
We know and are working with several people in redlined neighborhoods and houses and their lives are horrendous. Most just quietly go about their lives suppressing the horribleness of what happens on a daily basis. We pledge ourselves to expose such on a daily basis.
Lets look at one of our favorite houses in the Harvard Square/Brattle Street neighborhood.
There are many signs around that neighborhood which proclaim “Black Lives Matter.” We have yet to see the people doing something about helping to take some of the stress off the one or two African Americans who live in that neighborhood. The police went to the home of one such person in an effort to arrest him for “breaking and entering” his own home. They didn’t take him to the police station, but they were successful in pushing him out of that neighborhood, along with the help of a few realtors and the quiet acquiescence of many.
Another family is closely a part of Bettina Network, inc. and the police came and hauled the husband out of his house to push him into the psych ward of a hospital for no reason, changing their lives drastically and destroying their business. His family was charged $195,000.00 in hospital bills when he was forced into the hospital and not for medical reasons. He was not released until his family discovered MGH’s Facebook Page and wrote the story of what happened to him. They could not get him released until that appeared and the top levels of management in that hospital were made aware in a very public way of what was happening within their institution. They knew prior to that Facebook article appearing, however, that knowing did not result in any investigation or action. Why did MGH irnore this false imprisonment? We have given you $195,000 reasons as to why they kept a healthy, perfectly sane person tied to a bed, in the small part of a very large room, at 87 years of ago trying to incapacitate him. Against the demands of his family and his Health Care Advocate and others they put through an insurance charge that should never have happened. They came for him from Mount Auburn Hospital – where he had no experience and had never been except to see patients who requested he visit. They – the police – pushed him into MGH instead of Mount Auburn Hospital because of his wife having a “hissy fit about the whole thing, but that was the only change the family could accomplish. They were pretty helpless against 8 white policemen, five EMT’s, two ambulances, and more. The family was exposed to death by police, which is frequently what happens in such cases.
What did the neighbors do? One neighbor got involved by going to the house to see if they could help. An exceptional action and more of that is desperately needed.
One neighbor continued what they had been doing for quite some time – using that family’s beautiful garden as a dog toilet. Pushing the dog into the garden where it could drop its shit, leaving the feces in the garden and going his way. That still happens – years before and now years after that false imprisonment.
Since that family is always pro-active about what happens to them and others, they have confronted that neighbor many times, but it still doesn’t stop. The latest was a confrontation that doing such a thing constitutes criminal trespass and they were going to call the police. – that did nothing because that neighbor has a very racist and defiant history. He used to scratch up the car of a Jewish neighbor, who was also pro-active in his response. It did not get that very bigoted neighbor to stop the destruction and no one else intervened.
Since that Jewish neighbor is no longer living in that area, the neighbor violating the rights of minorities close to his house turned his attention to the African American family. His dog has been so well trained he refuses to “do his business” anyplace except in the garden of the African Americans. Scratching and uprooting their flowers and more. Two irises the African Americans planted have been dug up so the dog has a straight line into the garden to “crap.”
Another neighbor trying to push the African Americans out of the neighborhood into which this neighbor newly arrived and hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of having an African American family living on their block in their newly purchased home brought his dog to use that one family’s garden as a dog toilet. When confronted by the wife in that house he moved threateningly close to her face and stomped on her toes. When her husband, seeing all of this, left the house and went to defend his wife, the new neighbor turned and ran.
What is happening today? One neighbor has engaged his friends to bring their dogs to “do their business” in the garden and make a mess of what the African Americans have been developing into a beautiful garden for over 30 years.
We forget and some of us have never known what it is like to be so harassed on a daily basis because that harassment does not happen to whites in that neighborhood – only the one lone Black family standing its ground.
We passed by and saw how horribly the side of the garden next to the driveway looks after so many people have launched their attacks in as passive and unobtrusive a way as possible. Some have dropped their leaves in the garden, in the front entryway and in the driveway. Last year that family cleaned up some 65 bags of leaves and it looks as though this time that number will be increased.
Take down those “Black Lives Matter” signs people. They mean nothing to you and have no affect on your lives as you go about ignoring the mean spiritedness of the racists, sexists, homophobic, anti-semitics with whom you share a community and against whom you do nothing except ignore what is easy to see. Have you reached the point of blaming the minorities yet?
Much has been made of the push to pass the Voting Rights Bill. We think a larger push needs to be made over real estate and over how venture capitalists have used their money and other resources to infect this society with extreme racism. 