BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. WEST SIXTH TODAY, EAST FOURTH TOMORROW…OHIO CITY AND COVENTRY THE DAY AFTER THAT.
Where does it end? Lakewood? Shaker? The thin blue line is all that is stopping this from happening, but it’s probably too late. Cleveland…the domino theory at work.

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grizzster commening on Reported beating of a Morehouse graduate by off-duty officer adds to controversy in Cleveland’s Warehouse District

Seriously, (almost) every single comment on this article is intensely racist.  Thank god the plain dealer comments are here to make sure everyone knows that Cleveland is serious about keeping black people in their place (as the commenter says, keeping them from ‘ruining’ certain neighborhoods)  and cracking down on black troublemakers BAMN.

from the original article:

The men said they had gone out that night with white co-workers from a downtown bank, members of the same executive training program. The two were in the lobby near the door, preparing to leave, when a security guard pointedly told them it was time to go.

Ruiz, who recently moved here from Charlotte, N.C., said they responded that they were waiting for friends to come down from upstairs. He said the security guard shoved them out the door and onto the sidewalk.

Ruiz said that when he objected, another security guard grabbed him and slammed him onto the roof of a parked car and began punching him.

The street was busy with people and police, and Ruiz said he assumed police would come to his aid. Soon, he said, he realized he was dealing with a police officer.

In a police report, Officer Anthony J. Sauto said he was working off-duty and in plain clothes for Velvet Dog when he saw Ruiz and Parilla refusing to leave and he intervened. He said Ruiz became “verbally and physically aggressive,” then resisted arrest and tried to hit him.

I hear a lot of people from the northern part of the United States talk about how racist the southern part of this country is, but honestly I am not sure I have been anywhere in this country where serious racism and open/outward support of segregation is more a part of public/private discussion than cleveland. And I know you obviously can’t judge a whole city by the people who comment on newspaper webpages, but its a bizarrely frequent part of normal conversation.

Ohio has a complicated white supremacist history, and it seems like we might fare better in the future if we really seriously got down to business and dealt with our white supremacist present.

For months, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles has quietly refused to accept most Puerto Rican birth certificates, the primary document for people applying for a driver’s license or for a state identification card.
State officials say they judge the document to be untrustworthy and note the prohibition is temporary.
By Sept. 30, all Puerto Ricans born on the island are expected to have newly issued birth certificates with enhanced security features. The Ohio BMV is ready to accept those documents, said spokeswoman Lindsay Komlanc.

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Ohio BMV policy leaves people from Puerto Rico with identity crisis

Cleveland is in the midst of a puerto-ricans-are-not-to-be-trusted-and-probably-aren’t-u.s.-citizens-anyway freakout (and, you know, maybe they should just go home instead of Cleveland going to all the trouble of making ballots in more languages than just English).

The Cleveland Fire Department is investigating why firefighters who extinguished a burning car early Saturday failed to see the body of a man who had been shot to death and left inside.
The victim, who had not been identified Monday, was shot in the neck and died before the fire was set, according to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office.
The body was not discovered until about four hours after the fire was doused when police arrived to tow the vehicle. Officials would not say where the body was in the car.

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Cleveland fire officials to investigate why body was not found in burned car

business as usual in Cleveland

This is just another example of how the people if this area are their own worse enemies. In this area integration is 2 black people, 98 white. If there are three black people, it’s a gang. If it’s 5 or more black people, it’s am invading horde that will overwhelm the world.

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Giveupthefunk commenting on Warehouse District struggles with popularity, race issues and the legacy of the Flats

This is a fairly accurate assessment of Cleveland.

After all, Cleveland, the city he lived in and loved, had, he reminded us, lost half it’s population since the 1950s. A place whose great buildings and bridges and factories had once exemplified 20th century optimism needed its Harvey Pekar.

“What went wrong here?” is an unpopular question with the type of city fathers and civic boosters for whom convention centers and pedestrian malls are the answers to all society’s ills but Harvey captured and chronicled every day what was—and will always be—beautiful about Cleveland: the still majestic gorgeousness of what once was—the uniquely quirky charm of what remains, the delightfully offbeat attitude of those who struggle to go on in a city they love and would never dream of leaving.
What a two minute overview might depict as a dying, post-industrial town, Harvey celebrated as a living, breathing, richly textured society.

A few great artists come to “own” their territory…
As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they can—and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to disappoint them—go on, try as best as possible to do right by the people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be “good” people.

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The Original (Goodbye Splendor)

Even though I am a person who really never does this sort of thing, I have definitely cried over everything I’ve read about Harvey Pekar in the last several days. I am sure Ryan can attest to this.