This is to the black and brown moms and dads of Rochester: Move out.
If you’re black or Latino, and you have children, the city of Rochester is not for you, and it is definitely not for your children.
Yes, I’m an old white guy, and you might think I’m full of crap. But I know this place, on both sides of the city line, and I know the people in charge. And I know that you can’t any longer trust your safety or your children’s safety to people who don’t give a damn about you. You can’t continue to expose your children to a place that is undeniably dangerous to them.
Get the hell out.
This is a big region, with lots of towns and villages and country roads, and you can find a new home in any number of places where you will be safe and your children will be well educated. The city of Rochester will not give you either – safety or education – and it has become a trap grinding the lives of poor people of color to powder.
Get the hell out.
The schools are in turmoil, the unions are calling out the danger, and yesterday the mayor, the superintendent and the school board president couldn’t come up with anything better than a few cops in front of a few schools for a few minutes for a few days – on a day when six people were shot and one 19-year-old young man of color was murdered.
They don’t take your family’s safety seriously – you must. They don’t care what happens to your children – you must.
Rochester isn’t a city any longer, it’s a concentration camp. It’s where poor people of color are packed into a few square miles under corrupt and incompetent leaders who don’t even provide the most basic of municipal services. It’s a free-fire zone where the sons and daughters of the residents mean nothing to the high-paid dolts who run the place. It’s a place where the lives of young black and brown people are destroyed in the schools and snuffed out on the streets, where nobody cares except the vultures and jackals who run political or non-profit scams exploiting death and mayhem for grants and payoffs.
Nobody is serving you, they are exploiting you. Their wallet gets fatter and your life gets poorer. They play you like a fiddle and dump you like a McDonald’s wrapper in the streets.
You’ve got to get out.
Move to the suburbs, move to the country, move to a small city. Whether it’s Chili or Henrietta, Batavia or Brockport. Come to where I live, in Mount Morris, or Avon or Lyons or Sodus or Canandaigua. Hornell or Hilton, Livonia or Palmyra, or any one of the green country places in between.
Seriously.
If you are on public assistance, the EBT card works just as well outside the city as in – and typically you will have better selection, lower prices and a cleaner store. If you are on Section 8, great, there is Section 8 all across the region. If you commute, great, so do all of your new neighbors. If you would need a new job to move, excellent, this is the best time in years to be looking for a good, new job.
Are you afraid of all those white people out there? Well, you might be surprised to find they’re not all white, and you might be surprised to find they make pretty good neighbors. And you might be surprised that your new place quickly becomes your new home – not just where you stay, but where you thrive.
And you will achieve your two main goals the day you move in – safety for your family and education for your kids. Crime is everywhere, but not like in the city of Rochester. Nothing like in the city of Rochester. Come to places where people live in peace. Come to school districts where education actually happens, where even in the poorest of districts the basics get covered and the students get cared for and cared about.
Sure, it will be a change and an adjustment – like any move anywhere. But it will be a change for the better.
And you’ve got to make it.
The city of Rochester is a sinking ship. Maybe the folks in the big towers downtown are going to have it good. But you don’t live there. And you know that the neighborhoods where you do live have been in a steady downward spiral for at least five years, and you know that that spiral has escalated over the last year. And you know that nobody’s doing anything about it.
So you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to get your family out of the burning house.
You’ve got to get out of Rochester.
Stay in the area, but leave the city.
Before it kills you and your babies.