In the past few years, we've celebrated the half century anniversaries of some significant events in the struggle for civil rights, like the famous March on Washington, the passing of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Edmund Pettis Bridge march and more. Those events took place during my childhood and I remember turning on the TV to see the events of the day playing themselves out on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, or the Today Show in the mornings with Frank Blair intoning the news. Day after day, year after year, the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle and more flickered on our television screens as we went about our daily lives as it seemed, by 1968, that the world was having something like a collective nervous breakdown, which, in hindsight, I think is exactly what seemed to happen as madness and violence spread all over the world. It's a time period that I do not think that we have collective., ly ever recovered from, as the institutions and ideas that were so entrenched in society regarding people's stations in life were totally turned on their collective heads. Students, women and blacks suddenly found their voices and power and used them to upend everything society knew and expected. It was as close to a social revolution as anything I have ever witnessed. For the past 30+ years, there have been very successful efforts to undo all of the things that were fought for and won with those bitter struggles 50 years ago and it's so sad to see our country going backward instead of forward. Extreme right wingers want women out of the work force and back in the home, blacks back in their places being unable to cast a vote or have any kind of social equality and students compliant and silent, forced to work two, three or more jobs just to afford a college education that will still leave them in lifelong debt. Retirees are also seeing the pensions they worked their whole lives for basically taken away from them, forcing them either back in the workplace or reliant on an ever shredding social safety net. This is definitely
not the future that I signed up for, and how to keep the extreme right from eroding any more of our rights is going to take a new civil rights movement akin to the one that was fought a half century ago. That was the message made clear by Julian Bond, who I heard speak today at Kent State University as part of the Dr. Martin Luther King Day observances at the University. We can no longer stand idly by and let happen what has already occurred, the steady erosion of the social safety net and civil rights like voting. It's time to renew the fight and young people are going to have to rise up again and lead the way. I hope they don't just descend into electronic apathy staring at their little hand held devices texting one another. It's time for us all to rise up and renew the fight that was fought a half century ago before we lose so much that we'll never get it back.
NOT SO HOME SWEET HOME
It looks like I will have to move again in the spring. My landlord is probably going to sell this house and that means that the rent will probably double on my apartment that could very easily become a three bedroom apartment. The downstairs unit could conceivably be made into a two bedroom apartment, and that is probably what is going to happen when the house is sold. The rents here are going to go sky high because of location, location, location, as in, it's walkable to the university and downtown, and in this city, you pay a sky high premium for that privilege. It's a shame that location determines your rent and I will probably never again find another place to live that has the kind of space I have here for what I pay. The landlord originally wanted a far higher price for this place, but it had gone unrented for so long that I was basically able to name my own price and get a hell of a deal on it. Unfortunately, that deal won't last under a new landlord. I absolutely hate the idea of losing this place. It took me forever to find, it's in the same neighborhood where I have spent 55 of my 57 years living and I do not want to leave here. I'm settled, I've invested a lot of money in repairs and improvements to it and I want to call this my home. But I'm sure a new landlord will want to pack as many college students in this place as can be gotten away with to maximize profit. So it's time to start the house search anew, unfortunately. It breaks my heart to leave a place that I have barely settled into and have only lived in a short time.
Maybe, though, given the neighbors from hell, it will prove a blessing in disguise to leave here. The downstairs neighbors have refused to pay their half of utilities, leaving me holding the bag for paying the very high cost of living here, and the next door neighbors have proven to be quite chaotic and frustrating to live next door to. So maybe leaving here will be a good thing and will allow me to start anew in a better neighborhood and with less problematic neighbors. Still, I do love living here in my beloved neighborhood, but it's become the new High Rent District where only the very affluent can afford to live. I'll look around the area to see if any units open up nearby and try to work out a deal with the landlord to see if I can talk my way into naming the price that I can afford to pay. It worked here, it may work somewhere else. I just hate the whole process of having to pack up and move, something I will need to start doing now, since I will probably be moving out in a few months. It will take me at least that long to pack up this place and get out. Whoever inherits this place is going to get a mighty nice apartment. Sure going to miss it, though. It had everything that I wanted in an apartment: huge, spacious and deep walk-in closets (
three of them!), a nice spacious bathroom with a tub (and
not a shower stall like what I saw in almost every unit I looked at two years ago), a cavernous kitchen that allowed me to have an eat-in kitchen for the first time (that was filled with beautiful antique furniture gifted to me by my family),
two floors, something I had long dreamed of having, a broom closet in the kitchen, something else I had coveted, a basement, which I regarded as a storage requirement, a nice big front porch, a front yard, a back yard........so many great things about this place that will be nigh unto impossible to replace. Well, lucky is the person who gets this place. I'll miss it a lot.
Addendum: January 23 - it looks like I may be able to lock in a two year lease to allow myself to stay here for a while longer. That means that a search for new housing will have to begin in the fall as opposed to right now if the landlord is definitely selling, because here where I live, you absolutely
must reserve housing a year out from your intended occupancy. But that at least buys me a little time to begin looking and packing up if this house does go up for sale in the spring. I just hope that the landlord won't sell and that I can secure this place for the long term. I'm not much interested in moving again, even in spite of the non-stop neighbor drama here. If a new landlord
does take over soon, I am going to plead with whoever it is to allow me to stay and continue paying what I do now. They would be getting a quiet, middle aged and stable tenant in me, something that I am sure that any landlord would wish for in a tenant. Well, we'll see. I'll take it one day at a time here in the meantime.
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