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Comment by theropost | Hacker News Reader

As much as we like to blame government, and politicians - at the end of the day, ll... We are the government. We are the politicians. We are the inept, lazy society who has let it come to this. We are the ones fighting amongst ourselves, unable to converse and work with opposing viewpoints.

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Not necessarily. Jackson is a typical blue city in a red state. Even before all the gerrymandering, a single city won’t have enough political power at the state level. Given the political differences, state officials can withhold funding or hold back on maintenance without much repercussions.

I can name numerous blue cities in red states that, you know, have municipal water systems that work properly and have for decades. Stop blaming the Republican boogeyman for problems that are due to city-level incompetence and corruption. Jackson is most definitely not a well-run city that’s being held down by the white man. It has lots and lots of problems of their own design.

Democrats are using their party in order to associate themselves with the victims. This is an all-black city within a virulently racist state. That's the problem it has, and if you filtered cities by blackness, you'd find crumbling infrastructure and bad water everywhere. Comparing them to wealthy blue suburbs/cities within poorer red states is not useful.

White people in the state are trying to get funds to go to where they live, not where other people live (just like everyone does), and additionally they live in a revanchist mythology of Jackson being overrun by blacks with the help of the Democrats, and tell stories of how beautiful Jackson was to their grandparents. That would be enough to seal off any possible empathy.

Jackson is just big Flint. Or Dixmoor: https://news.google.com/search?q=dixmoor+water

In the 60s and 70s, ghettos grew to encompass entire cities while the middle-class retreated to subsidized enclaves. In the 2000s, the grandkids moved back into the city for work and to imitate people on television who seemed cooler than them. Maybe this is the next phase of the cycle.

I could not disagree more. The proletariat has no voice in a country where actual bribery has been legally upheld by the highest court.

Governments in the US are set up explicitly to represent minority interests, usually those of owners of large amounts of property, over the interests of the public at large.

You're assuming that the people of Jackson have a voice in their government. The city is majority black, and in Mississippi that's more enough than enough reason for the rest of the state elected representitives to reject any aid to the city.

That sounds true, but the Mississippi state legislature is 29% black. That's not a majority, but it seems difficult to justify the view that the state government isn't helping these people because of racism in light of this fact.

How is our inability to converse and work with opposing viewpoints relevant to a situation occurring in a state entirely dominated by a single viewpoint? There are many, many problems (most problems?) whose causes have nothing to do with a lack of unity or civility (relative to when?) in US national politics or whatever.

This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state. That seems like differing politics could be relevant.

>This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state.

This is a strongly black city inside a strongly white supremacist state.

Let's just put the cards on the table here - this tends not to happen in majority white areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism_in_the_Un...

> We are the government. We are the politicians.

Huh? No we’re not. What are you talking about?

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