Section Eight Housing and the Incredible Absence of Integrity

 

Shock and near panic rippled through my section of Lexington County recently with the news of a Section Eight housing project being built in an area surrounded by upper middle class subdivisions. I learned of the news from the “Nextdoor” social media app, something akin to Facebook but emphasizing local neighborhoods. Two or three years ago my subdivision's Home Owners Association started pushing for all the residents to join so we could communicate faster. Prior to last Tuesday when the Section Eight panic began I strictly limited my participation to receiving email alerts in case something other than asinine bullshit was ever shared.

What I mean by asinine bullshit involved countless garage sale notices, inspirational writings of a religious nature, along with the expected hyper-patriotic posts involving shrill civilians all wanting everyone else to know how much they truly loved America. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing for the most part. You would be a fool to expect a duck not to quack and a cat not to go meow. It's what they do and comfy, fat American civilians who live in McMansions love their miniature English estates and get teary-eyed about a country the vast majority have never lifted a hand to serve in any capacity.

I was already at work Tuesday morning when I started checking my email and saw the fearful subject lines of the disaster that was going to befall on the perfect subdivisions near the purposed housing project. Crime, property devaluation, unruly elements that would make it unsafe for families to walk the streets at night were all common comments by the people up in arms that their area would be saddled with poor folks trying to find a decent place to live.

I'll give a few of the scared locals a little, backhanded credit. Some did couch their complaints in semi-reasonable areas such as the schools are already overcrowded and that local traffic is a damn nightmare. But the area schools have been overcrowded for literally decades with some already pushed beyond capacity the same years that start operation. The summer my daughter's middle school opened for the first time the tar on the roof wasn't even dry and the school district was already buying portable classroom trailers because they had too many students.

Describing the local traffic congestion would have me devolving into fits or rage best left untouched. Just understand it's bad and every addition of a new fast food joint, strip mall, or convenience store/gas station makes everything exponentially worse. Throw in an ambulance trying to save someone's life or a fire truck in route to an emergency and the already slow traffic can come to a confusing, messy stop.

But I'll be sickeningly honest, the majority of people against the section eight housing wrote their comments in such as way that it was painfully clear that they had particular worries about the future residents living in the housing project. I'm sure they had poor redneck white folks at least partially in mind as their fingers danced in fear over the their keyboards. But it was obvious that there was some racial and ethnic fears being stoked by those opposing the project.

Just to make things that more ridiculous, a few even began bringing up conspiracy theories involving the usual suspects on the left. One person wrote about how this was an attempt to change the voting population of the county. That person's point being that the area is so deeply politically red that some nefarious group or individual was trying to throw political blue into the area mix. Another spoke openly of another conspiracy that someone was purposely trying to damage the property values.

Just understand, the sharing of possible conspiracies got deep as the comments began to pile up in number. Not that it surprised me, for a couple of years I had a certain local lawn irrigation company help me with my troublesome sprinkler system, that is until the owner in a offhanded manner back in 2008 said he knew for a fact that Barrack Obama was a Muslim. I may live among the crazy, but I don't have to do business with them.

What actually depressed me though, was the total lack of empathy the vast majority of people writing comments had for anyone they perceived as outside their suburban socioeconomic level. From their point of view, everyone who would be living in the section eight housing would be a drag on the upper middle class area. Now about four or five brave individuals challenged the majority in the comments essentially saying, “poor folks have to live somewhere too.”

That's when the accusations of being a liberal/”libtard”, Marxist, socialists troublemaker began flying. This might make a few people reading this angry but you can't throw a rock in my area without it coming close to numerous upscale churches that in my opinion act more like country clubs and whose parking lots overflow with luxury cars. I scanned pretty hard but failed to find any individual oppose the majority and agree with the section eight housing project on the grounds of the teachings of Jesus Christ. You know, the love thy neighbor angle that was drilled into my head during Sunday School.

The few individuals standing up for the poor were strictly social justice warriors on the secular end of the political spectrum.

The only conclusion I can take away from this disgusting situation is that we have degenerated into tribalism. America and Americans don't really exist in this day and age of paranoia and extreme gaps between the rich and poor. We've long since successfully balkanized the country between the elite rich and those living in abject poverty. But the fractures have spread to the middle class with those living in comfort already turning on those who can't purchase their way into McMansions.

Hey, I don't agree with it but I can understand billionaires or multimillionaires acting like old English aristocrats consisting of dukes, earls, and barons. But it seems clear to me even a lot of middle class folks have an irrational animosity towards poor people.

Affordable low-income housing is difficult to find in the best of times. And while there would be issues with the construction of section eight housing what are poor folks supposed to do? Conveniently retreat deep enough into the shadows of society till they can't be seen by the easily disturbed middle class?

I didn't want to bring myself into this rant but I didn't spend twenty-one years in the army and National Guard to be a part of some bullshit experiment in social Darwinism. I'm no saint, but I have enough of a conscious that I can't ignore those less unfortunate than me. I just there was an easy way for me to flee this chicken shit county. 

 

 Here's an edited screen shot of one small segment of the comments

Addendum for The Tomorrow War

 

 During my rush to express my general dislike of Chris Pratt I forgot to add some important information about time travel. While the initial sloppy premise of The Tomorrow War was for the world of 2051 to ask for help from our present day world the question of changing future events was always in the background.

Speaking strictly as a curious layman when it comes to the actual implications of traveling backwards in time I believe the scientific consensus is that it isn't possible. We are naturally traveling into the future one second per second and through various means like approaching the speed of light or sitting close to the edge of a black hole “faster” forward time travel is possible.

But every reasonable science article I have read or video I watch says traveling backwards in time is problematic. Without getting deep into the mathematical weeds, which I have no ability to comprehend, I think Einstein's theories say nothing prohibits backwards time travel as far as the universe is concerned but it would take God-like powers.

The key here is that nothing outright forbids backwards time travel so various real and respected scientists have speculated on what would happen if someone or groups began shuffling through the space-time continuum.

Of course the Grandfather Paradox is the favorite with some psychotic moron going back in time to kill his grandfather before his own father was conceived. So if the father was never born how could an insane kid go back and kill his grandfather?

Some have speculated that such actions would create a temporal loop. The kid is born as he is supposed to be, grows up and builds a time machine, then goes back in time shoots his teenage grandfather in the head. Granddaddy never has a son so the kid is never born. Because the kid is never born he never builds a time machine to go back and kill his grandfather. So events proceed as they occurred with the Grandfather having a son who goes one to have a kid of his own. So once again the kid grows up, hates his Grandfather, builds a time machine and travels back to shoot him in the head. This loop presumably would continue for eternity.

Is it just me or does this put a big dent into the idea of free will?

The alternative is that instead of a temporal loop, time has a way to protect itself. Instead of backwards time travel such a homicidal grand kid would instead travel to an alternate universe set in the years during his grandfather's childhood. Killing that person would prevent your counterpart from being born but leave your own universe/timeline untouched. 

Going for shits and giggles here by throwing a hypothetical timey-wimey wrench into the time-space continuum, but what would be really wild is if we could reverse time would be to look at events on a much wider perspective. Instead of focusing our attention just on an insane genius-level kid traveling to the past to murder his teenage grandfather, look at the mundane decisions normal people make during the course of their day during that same period. 

Insane kid keeps a record of what his friends, Tom, Dick, and Harry did the day before he pops back years in the past to kill his grandfather. Insane kid then goes forward in time to that day and secretly observes his friends to see if they make the same choices. These choices could be anything from what shirt they wear, the route they take to work, or what they decide to have for lunch.          

If there is the least little bit of deviation from what they originally did that would leave open the idea of free will, I guess.

This all feeds back into the ultimate conclusion of the movie. While sending troops to the future to fight a clearly lost war just doesn't make any sense. The world of 2051 could have just sent the same group to our present with tons of information on what will happen along with the bio-weapon to make a more plausible movie.

Personally, while I have my doubts on the degree of free will humans actually have, I think the far more likely reality of backwards time travel would be sliding over to an alternate universe. But then again I'm no scientist, but goofing with the flow of temporal events just doesn't ring true in an universe that seems so highly ordered.

The Trolley Dilemma-- My View

 

Here's the situation, you are on a nature trail walking next a trolley track minding you own business. Out of what seems nowhere, you see the local dastardly villain running off and disappearing into the nearby woods. You hear the villain laughing and see him twirling his heavily waxed mustache as he runs off and instantly know he was up to his usual evil schemes.

So you run ahead to find five people tied to the main trolley track and one person tied to a secondary track that branched off a little further down and then runs parallel to it. All six of these people are tied down to the tracks with strong chains and heavy padlocks. Alone and without any tools, you simply have no way to set them free.

Things immediately get worse when you see a speeding, unmanned trolley heading down the tracks about a minute away from running over the five individuals tied down on the main track. There is simply no way around it, five people will die horrible deaths when the trolley runs over them.

But wait, there is a lever where the secondary track branches off that would send the trolley down that alternate track. You can save the five people tied together but condemn the one person on the secondary track to death.

Feeling the weight of the decision you have to make bearing down on your shoulders you run up to the lever. Do you save five people by sending the trolley down the secondary track but assure the death of one innocent victim? Are do you let the trolley continue and have it kill the five allowing the lone person on the other track to live?

Which is the more ethical choice?

This moral philosophy problem was reintroduced to me recently by one of the podcasts I listen to while on the way to work and going home from. Even though it is an unrealistic problem I, of course, was drawn back into the workings of this dilemma.

Just from the information I've given of six random individuals tied down to trolley tracks my instincts tell me to throw the lever and save the five at the expense of the one. On the outset that makes my moral philosophy Utilitarian in nature in that I want to maximize happiness and well-being for the most people. So in this case I'm a hero to the five people tied together because I condemned one innocent person to death.

It's insanely easy even for me to see how this way of thinking could lead to monstrous crimes against humanity if taken to an extreme level. For example let's say cops in a city start playing a kinder, gentler versions of Gestapo tactics in a black neighborhood to prevent the people living there from going into a nearby white subdivision.

I have no doubt that many of the white subdivision residents could happily justify such actions because it would, in their minds, lessen the crime rate. To hell with the ideas of being a free country of individual rights and human dignity, the average paranoid white resident would think. He doesn't want any strange looking, undesirable types walking through his subdivision. He and his neighbors have families and property values to protect.

Getting back to the Trolley Dilemma, I can see, but not agree, with the viewpoint that making any life or death decision on the part of the people tied to the tracks makes the person at the lever morally culpable. The person at the lever has been forced into a nightmare scenario where there is no real moral choice. Given the situation, someone will die it's just the degree of death that's in question. No, the person at the lever would not save anyone by throwing themselves on the track ahead of the unmanned trolley.

From what little research I've done, the variations on the Trolley Dilemma run straight into the absurd. A good number revolve around the group of five being strangers while the person tied to the secondary track being the free individual's child or spouse.

You might be surprised to know one of my biggest issues with the Trolley Dilemma is that our society makes similar decisions constantly. Oh, we cover them up in deep, detached layers of responsibility but we're always making decisions that affect the lives of others.

The easiest one off the top of my head is how Americans love bargains. We flock in mass to places like Walmart because of the low prices allowing the customer to save money. The connection to the Trolley Dilemma is that Walmart and others buys most of their products overseas. This practice destroyed millions of manufacturing jobs in America degrading the living standards of the workers. Walmart loving Joe and and Janet Blow may have a great large screen television for an insanely cheap price. But the factory where their parents may have worked building Magnavox televisions decades ago is now a decaying, empty ruin.

So whats my answer to the Trolley Dilemma? For the five people tied to the track, I'd have to save them at the expense of the one. But for the other, more abstract versions that occur, I don't have a clue.