It is typical of modern people to focus on the material degradation and neglect the metaphysical degradation that precedes it.
ALAN writes:
What a difference a century makes. Here is one example:
It must have been in 1964 when I first walked into the Cleveland Rexall Pharmacy on South Grand Boulevard in south St. Louis. We were living then about half a mile from there. I distinctly remember walking many times, sometimes in early evening, to the nearby Sears department store and Ben Franklin dime store. The Cleveland Pharmacy was midway on the path I walked.
I bought magazines there in 1965-’67. A radiator stood in a corner near the window. The magazine rack was to the left as you walked into the store. It was a very modest affair, compared with today’s magazine displays festooned with sensation, filth and ugliness. The storefront consisted of a large plate-glass window and the entry door. Among the magazines I purchased were Fate, Life, The Saturday Evening Post and a 1966 issue of Look with Jackie Gleason on the cover.
Sometimes my mother and I stopped there to have a prescription filled. Toward the back of the store was a classic old telephone booth with wood partitions and folding glass door. I recall using that telephone several times. I remember walking through those residential streets on summer days in 1963-’64. I came to know the neighborhood by heart. It was always clean and orderly. It never occurred to us that it could be otherwise.
Years went by, and then decades. I stopped at the Cleveland Pharmacy less often. My last visit there was in the 1980s or early 1990s. It was still pretty much the same as it had been in the 1960s. But the neighborhood around it was changing–gradually at first, and then increasingly obviously but not for the better. Standards were declining. Lawbreaking was increasing. The old setting and neighborhood were all-White. The new setting and neighborhood were being made increasingly Black. I did not realize it at first, but I was now witnessing the surrender of an orderly neighborhood to an undeclared “public-private partnership” of thugs (on the streets) and excuse-makers (in the legislature and the courts).
The time soon arrived when I realized I had now become an alien in the neighborhood where I roamed at will in boyhood — because that neighborhood had been made wholly alien to me. Street thugs were the obvious villains, but they were not alone. Change agents in government were the engineers, and they were hard at work. They still are.
Throughout all those earlier years, it never occurred to me to take pictures of the outside of the pharmacy or the building in which it stood. In the 1950s, my grade school classmates and I became experts in walking the streets and alleys in the neighborhood around that drug store. We were too young to know anything about the building’s history. It was called the Roosevelt Apartments and it opened in 1927. Apartments were on the upper two floors, and three storefronts were at ground level. An apartment could be rented for $75 a month. The building was advertised as “One of the most notable improvements of the South Grand district… It is fireproof.” Two blocks away was an old Catholic hospital. Across from it was a Kroger store. The streetscape also included a floral shop, a candy store, and a company of artisans who made stained glass windows.
Decades later, South Grand Boulevard began to be named in more and more crime reports from that neighborhood. Some examples:
2002: Armed robbery at service station across the street from the Roosevelt building.
2013: Two people are shot at a store in that block; a man shot dead one block south.
2014: Of course it is imperative that large glass windows be shattered. That is part of the “Breaking down barriers” propaganda line. And that is why the Roosevelt building is now boarded-up.
2016: Two women shot dead, 6 a.m., one block south.
2017: Three men were shot at the service station.
2019: Man robbed and stabbed, a block south. Another man shot dead, a block north.
2022: Gun battle takes place,1 a.m., a block south. On another night, same location, police from multiple districts engage in high-speed chase of assault suspects.
2024: The building’s facade was defaced with spray paint and the back of the building collapsed.
2025: A man living around the corner from there was robbed at gunpoint. A dead man was found in the building.
2026: Two fires were reported in the building. The fire department said it found that “10 households occupied the building…” Imagine that–in a building vacant for years, boarded-up, defaced with spray paint, and partially collapsed.
A century later, “One of the most notable improvements” had been made into a jungle habitat on a busy commercial street in a neighborhood that was once clean and orderly. It has stood there, half-collapsed, for more than two years: A monument in the material realm to the metaphysical mush that Americans now imbibe in lieu of a strong moral code. Observe how often such people claim they “just don’t understand how such things can happen”. The truth is they don’t want to understand; they want to evade — because there is nothing they hate more than responsibility. If this were not true, their excuse-making industries and profiteers would go out of business overnight. Is such a development foreseeable? Aha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Degradation in the material realm follows degradation in the metaphysical realm as surely as night follows day.
That such abominations are permitted to stand for years in plain sight is no accident but a signal from an Occupation Government that such destruction will not be opposed or punished, another example of planned chaos.
It is typical of modern people to focus on the material degradation and neglect the metaphysical degradation that precedes it. If you think the degradation described above was perpetrated by Blacks, you are right. If you think such things are not excused and accommodated by Whites, you are wrong. There is not a trace remaining of the authority, knowledge, confidence and pride of White men like those who designed and built the Roosevelt Apts. Instead, today’s White men exude appeasement, apologies, and accommodation — the only guiding principles they know. They will not oppose degradation like that described above, but will excuse and accommodate it. They make their ancestors look like moral giants by comparison.
