Originally published at: Gary, Indiana is "The Most Miserable City in America" | Boing Boing
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I know a very convincing song suggesting otherwise - and it only has one S in it.
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Framing (and gawping at) particular cities as inherently awful gives me a similar uncomfortable feeling as when affluent acquaintances dismiss areas as the “bad” part of town or whatever (or when people speak about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ public schools as if those are inherent properties).
It often ignores how the residents of the town are typically unwilling victims of the town’s poor conditions, not the ones responsible for them, and it often ignores the systemic reasons (say, capitalism…) why some places are more “miserable” than others. Obviously the solution is to build a brick wall to contain the plague that it Gary, not, you know, fix the systems that make it (and much of this country) such a shit hole.
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Came here for this -was not disappointed
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Indiana wants me 
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Agreed, but in fact the video is a well researched and well balanced digest of just this kind of hidden history. I was surprised to find myself watching the whole thing because, why would I? Worth a dozen minutes to get a clear sense of how capitalism has never worked and how cities like Gary are among the many many casualties down the road…
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Don’t forget racism, too. But yeah, it was a good analysis on what caused the population bust in Gary since the 1970s…
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Where there’s capitalism, there’s racism! Hours of fun can be had arguing about which is the smoke, which the fire…
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But yeah… kind of goes without say, but it’s still important to say!
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pssst… I assume you have a typo there, or else the song is very different than I remember…
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Spell check likes Indian over Indiana, I have no f’ing idea why…
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I went to college at Purdue, and many of my closest friends there were from Gary/Hammond/Whiting.
Can confirm. I still remember visiting my roommate Joe one summer… he took me to a streetcorner a couple of blocks from his house where he could point directly to not one, not two, but three completely separate EPA superfund sites…
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Color me skeptical that it’s true - there’s a lot of competition for that title, after all.
Yeah, American cities are frequently shitty for long-standing structural reasons, with the humans at a loss as to what to do to fix things (because addressing the structures is either beyond them and/or inconceivable).
But the video does leave you kind of excited though doesn’t it?
Gary could become some kind of new Berlin.
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Hence the cancer rates that are orders of magnitude higher than average.
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Sorry, I meant to say New East Berlin.
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Indiana does not exist.
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It used to be well-known that when driving on the highway through Gary, everyone closed their windows and their vents and set the fan to recirculate, even in the height of summer, because the air from all of the factories was dark gray, greasy, and filled with particulates.
It got better when regulations were finally applied, but then as a series of Republicans were elected (I mean, assigned by the Electoral College) to the Presidency, the scrubbers magically disappeared and the air was filed with pollution yet again. At night, you can see that many of the industrial smoke stacks are literally on fire, as they used to be.
It’s the only place I know of in the States where the highway going straight through the middle of town – oh look, City Hall is right there! – doesn’t de-escalate traffic; it stays at 70 mph while whizzing past entrances/exits every few blocks at one point. No one getting on or off, though, it’s just that the ramps exist.
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