Dystopia doesn’t look so bad, if you avert your gaze at the correct moments. From a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, under the headline,
Roper: Doomsday docs aside, Minneapolis’ lush urbanity makes it a special place to call home.
It begins,
I’ll be walking down a sidewalk and stumble into a passageway made of sunflowers.
I’m not kidding, that’s the first sentence. In Eric Roper’s telling, present day Minneapolis isn’t a lost Eden, it’s a current Eden.
The Doomsday Doc he refers to is A Precarious State, the 1-hour film put together by Rick Kupchella, a former TV anchor with the local NBC affiliate.
The usual definition of “urbanity” is “suavity, courteousness, and refinement of manner.” There is little to see of that on the ground in Minneapolis these days.
After waxing nostalgic for some thirteen (13) paragraphs, Roper finally gets to the point,
But I think I’m also clear-eyed about the condition of Minneapolis, which is grappling with real public safety problems.
Say it ain’t so! Roper writes later,
It often seems like the rest of the metro thinks that a) grim headlines translate into some daily Mad Max hellscape and b) this is not their problem.
But a) is exactly Kupchella’s point. Any my own point since I coined the phrase “Detroit. on the Mississippi” many years ago. If you wait until Mad Max shows up, it’s already too late. As for b), if Kupchella believed it wasn’t his problem, he wouldn’t have made the documentary.
Roper thinks that Minneapolis is worth saving. He may be correct. If so, it’s far too late to be looking at the bright side.
