The Inside Dope

If all the apostrophe marks and stuff's been buggin you lately as much as it has me, I'm hopin you'll see a different look in this little column from now on- if I can keep these young whippersnappers at The Sun in line for a few days, that is. I don't mind their attempts at makin me sound folksy and all, but enough is enough. I'd say 'a word to the wise' if I thought it 'd do any good, but they wouldn't even know what I was referrin to.

Speakin of the wise, the way people are talkin about the mayor and his administration bein corrupt and crooked and incompetent is a cryin shame, if ya ask me. Now if the people who were sayin all this had somethin to offer themselves it might not be so bad, but these are the very same characters who had total control of this city up to 1974, when Coleman Young took over.

They fought him tooth and nail while he was runnin for office, goin so far as to select the most vicious redneck thug in town- former police commissioner John Nichols- to run the city for them if he could beat Coleman in the election. And they've continued to fight the brother even harder since he's been in office, doin everything within their power to make it impossible for him to carry out his programs and start restorin the city to its former stature as one of this country's most dynamic and beautiful urban centers.

These are the people who built the factories, polluted the rivers and the air, tore the neighborhoods down to run their freeways through, developed the suburbs and made billions of dollars in the process, commissioned the police to beat the black folks in town into submission, engineered the HUD scandals which finished off what the expressways started in the neighborhoods, stripped the city of businesses and services and millions of dollars worth of taxes, and now drive in from the suburbs to get the money and take it back out with them, strengthenin their ticky-tacky strongholds of pure whiteness and slowly chokin off the remainin inhabitants of the Murder City.

If these same people didn't own the newspapers, radio stations and TV outlets in the area, folks would be able to see and evaluate their performance for what it really is- a record of unremitting greed, arrogance.and outright theft. But they got a heavy lock on almost all the information that goes out to the public these days, and they use their so-called "freedom of the press" to twist things around to where they got most folks thinkin altogether backwards- even the victims of their crimes.

I'll tell ya one thing fer sure- all these folks've got for the rest of us is a whole lot more of the same, comin harder and faster and hittin deeper and deeper all the time. They won't be satisfied until they can squeeze every drop of blood outa all the people who get in their way, take all our money and leave us to kill each other off.

Well, I know it ain't much but that's my thought for today, dear readers. I just hope the youngsters who give me this space every week to shoot my mouth off can keep it up-if this paper goes down it'll be a hard blow for all of us. Keep yer chin up, and like we used ta say-watch yer back!