Write It Off Or
Pick Up The Pieces?
By
Nick Ashton, CEO/Founder,
Tracometry Group of Companies.
Run-down,
dilapidated, crime-infested and drug-ridden are descriptors that homeowners
typically avoid attaching to their neighborhoods — unless those terms describe
what the area was like before its revitalization.
Wait a
second! What revitalization? Our neighborhoods are going to hell in a hang basket!
Have you
driven around your city, I mean places you have never been or seen before? We just did and wow! Houses boarded up, seedy folks hanging on the
only house left on the block, if you can call it house, on a street with folks
hanging on street corners, which look like they just dropped in from a scene
from Escape from New York.
Seeing a
neighborhood fall apart in front of your eyes, never happens, it is like, now
you see, now you don’t. Like driving to
work the same way each day, you miss the construction of a tall building,
until, you stop in traffic at a place you have never stopped before, turn, and
see this monstrosity that seems to have appeared from nowhere, right in front
of your eyes. You know the feeling…
So what has
happened to a country that had it all?
What are we, a third world country?
Do we need to go to the United Nations and ask for aid? It sure looks that way! No disrespect to Third World countries, at
least you are moving forward and this nation has taken an almighty drop…
I look at
pictures of Africa, Syria, Haiti, and Cuba, blinking and cursing under my
breath on what I am seeing and feeling on their situation. I have walked the
streets of London, I grew up there, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Liberia, smelled the
poverty, kicked the trash and looked in the eyes of hopeless people, knowing
back then, that we, in America, had never had it so good. How wrong I was! Today, just look at us! How can we just continue as if nothing is wrong?
Detroit is broke! It has nothing but people who live day to
day, children who have no future if the family stays. Then again, where do you go, when you have no
money for the bus, if it is still running?
The Michigan
governor has brought in a financial manger to assist in finding out what has
gone wrong and how it can be saved. Do what?
A bit late, when your own administration has run it into the
ground. Once the King of the Automobile industry
is up on blocks and the body has been stripped of all that was worth saving. Who is next on the list? Have you looked out the window lately?
The news
tells us each day of the violence, sexual and domestic abuse, crime and the death
of another teen or someone in a home invasion.
It will take education, intervention, employment opportunities and a real jolt of reality which is not going
to happen, unless the community and neighborhood roll up their sleeves and can
see the path out of their pitiful existence.
So what are
you going to do? Sitting there drinking your Latte, in a sterile
Starbucks, among others who choose to ignore the blight that is all around
you.
I am not!
I am a doer, like the city I
live in and cities around me that have a vision, an achievable vision and daily,
work on all the aspects of running a business.
Communities are a business and so are the people within those
communities and they cannot be left to their own devices. Cities and municipalities
have the citizens as their clients and must serve them to the best of their
abilities. Those that wish to continue,
the “them and us syndrome”, you will
be left by the wayside, only to be found by our future anthropologists and historians
in the big book of failure. Examples of
how not live your life and to be a dis-service to your fellow man, woman and
child.
You see, we
are seeing the results of the entitlement
generations that is firmly entrenched in their DNA. This is the government assistance programites. A sickness that has been left to fester and
placed on the bottom of the list of
things to do.
We do not
need mouth pieces who only come out when the television news cameras are
rolling and go back to study their books and just prayer for action. We need and require people who have a conscious
and the will to be part of the biggest change America needs right now.
It is about pro-activity, not delayed reactionary failure.
So are we
going to write it off or pick-up the pieces?
I know
where I stand and the effort I am placing on picking up the pieces…
Call: (317) 426.0110
Email: pickitup@tracometry.com
copyright 2013 Tracometry Group of Companies – All Rights
Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment