The Demolition of Riverdale: This is Not My America

Today, I drove out to Riverdale to photograph whatever I could. I decided to leave when one of the security guards appeared to be calling the police. I made some folks very uncomfortable. They should be. They’re participating in the commission of a crime against humanity. Too strong a language? Hardly. The same company who controls access to clean water now has a hand in poisoning it. The more precious and scarce a commodity, the more we will pay for it–especially when it is also a necessity of life. Aqua America is neither about “aqua” or “America”–unless, of course, you think water just another marketable good and America not as a nation, but as a corporation: America, INC., marketers of genocidal profiteering.

The thing I most want folks to see in these pictures, however, is that there are still people living in this park. Please look closely. You’ll quickly discover that amidst these bulldozers are the homes of the remaining residents whose mailboxes are lined up outside the chain-link fencing. The mailboxes are themselves quite striking–they suggest that this is a community, that folks really do live here, that there’s “nothing to see.” But just behind them is the fence. behind it another fence–lined with razor wire. And behind it the complete transformation of what was, first, more than 30 years of a neighborhood–and then for twelve days a deliberate community of resistance.

How can this happen in America? It can; it will continue if we do not lend our voices to the outrage against this displacement of human lives and this rape of the environment.

This is America, INC–where property is worth more than people–where property is worth more than life itself.

“Today, I drove out to Riverdale to photograph whatever I could. I decided to leave when one of the security guards appeared to be calling the police. I made some folks very uncomfortable. They should be. They’re participating in the commission of a crime against humanity. Too strong a language? Hardly. The same company who controls access to clean water now has a hand in poisoning it. The more precious and scarce a commodity, the more we will pay for it–especially when it is also a necessity of life. Aqua America is neither about “aqua” or “America”–unless, of course, you think water just another marketable good and America not as a nation, but as a corporation: America, INC., marketers of genocidal profiteering.”

From The Demolition of Riverdale: This is Not My America, posted by Wendy Lynne Lee on 6/21/2012 (30 items)