Detroit's such a messed up city that it presents a window into the coming darkness.
The whole concept of a once very large prosperous city declining into abandonment and destruction in such a short time is unprecedented in human history. There really is nothing like it. I sometimes drive the old neighborhoods of my youth (what's left of them) and marvel at the many crumbling structures and empty buildings that were once the sign of a busy metropolis.
For instance this story is fascinating in the images it provokes.
Unclaimed dead stack up in Wayne County morgue
His corpse lies at the bottom of a pile of other bodies unclaimed at the Wayne County morgue. But Grandpa -- whose name has been withheld to avoid embarrassing his family -- is a special case. He has been in the cooler for the past two years as his kinfolk -- too broke to bury him -- wait for a ship to come in.
Peering into the small glass window of the cooler door, Schmidt counts 52 unclaimed bodies stacked like cordwood -- in some cases four to a shelf; always two to a gurney.
Any way you slice it, says Schmidt, the cramped cooler is a repository of the human condition. "How society treats its dead says volumes about the way society lives," he says. "Civilization requires intrinsically that we bury the dead. It distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom."
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20090806/METRO08/908060426#ixzz23U4WX3qk
The whole concept of a once very large prosperous city declining into abandonment and destruction in such a short time is unprecedented in human history. There really is nothing like it. I sometimes drive the old neighborhoods of my youth (what's left of them) and marvel at the many crumbling structures and empty buildings that were once the sign of a busy metropolis.
For instance this story is fascinating in the images it provokes.
Unclaimed dead stack up in Wayne County morgue
Peering into the small glass window of the cooler door, Schmidt counts 52 unclaimed bodies stacked like cordwood -- in some cases four to a shelf; always two to a gurney.
Any way you slice it, says Schmidt, the cramped cooler is a repository of the human condition. "How society treats its dead says volumes about the way society lives," he says. "Civilization requires intrinsically that we bury the dead. It distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom."
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20090806/METRO08/908060426#ixzz23U4WX3qk
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