© Jessica Kourkounis 20 Comment 312 Carl Washington, 11, left, and Kirhe Williams, 16, play curb ball in front of a vacant house on Morton Street.
No jobs, no hope - and surveillance cameras everywhere. The strange, sad story of CamdenThe first thing you notice about Camden, New Jersey, is that pretty much everyone you talk to has just gotten his or her ass kicked.
Instead of shaking hands, people here are always lifting hats, sleeves, pant legs and shirttails to show you wounds or scars, then pointing in the direction of where the bad thing just happened.
"I been shot six times," says Raymond, a self-described gangster I meet standing on a downtown corner. He pulls up his pant leg. "The last time I got shot was three years ago, twice in the femur." He gives an intellectual nod. "The femur, you know, that's the largest bone in the leg."
"First they hit me in the head," says Dwayne "The Wiz" Charbonneau, a junkie who had been robbed the night before. He lifts his wool cap to expose a still-oozing red strawberry and pulls his sweatpants down at the waist, drawing a few passing glances. "After that, they ripped my pockets out. You can see right here. . . ."
Even the cops have their stories: "You can see right here, that's where he bit me," says one police officer, lifting his pant leg. "And I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm going to have to shoot this dog.'"
"I've seen people shot and gotten blood on me," says Thomas Bayard Townsend III, a friendly convicted murderer with a tear tattoo under his eye. "If you turn around here, and your curiosity gets the best of you, it can cost you your life."
Camden is just across the Delaware River from the brick and polished cobblestone streets of downtown Philadelphia, where oblivious tourists pour in every year, gobbling cheese steaks and gazing at the Liberty Bell, having no idea that they're a short walk over the Ben Franklin Bridge from a full-blown sovereignty crisis - an un-Fantasy Island of extreme poverty and violence where the police just a few years ago essentially surrendered a city of 77,000.
All over America, communities are failing. Once-mighty Rust Belt capitals that made steel or cars are now wastelands. Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the default button and start the whole national experiment all over again.
But in Camden, chaos is already here. In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today. Thirty percent of the remaining population is under 18, an astonishing number that's 10 to 15 percent higher than any other "very challenged" city, to use the police euphemism. Their home is a city with thousands of abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats.
Comment: In the aftermath of the explosion, while the authorities - local, State and Federal - were more concerned with keeping a tight leash on information emerging from the site, Bryce Reed helped victims of the blast and stepped up as a spokesman for the town, answering media requests from journalists all over the world:
Two days later, Reed was fired from his job, with no reason given. Then a media campaign began insinuating that he was mentally unstable. Finally, he was handed those ridiculous charges a month after the explosion.
Reed's attorney, Jonathan Sibley, reckons he was set up to shut him up: The 'pipe bomb materials' (literally a portion of pipe and a bag of some chemical or other) were in turn given to Reed by his friend and colleague Cyrus Reed (no relation) who was killed in the explosion, and who Bryce Reed gave an eulogy to at his funeral:
The authorities still have no clue what caused the blast... or so they say.
Remember, it was a HUGE explosion: Perhaps they haven't found the cause because they haven't considered this possibility:
Was the West, Texas Explosion a Meteorite Impact?
In the meantime, Reed is a convenient scapegoat. Sure, in sentencing him based on these trumped-up charges they 'clarify' that he wasn't responsible for the blast, but the mere association is enough to seed the idea in people's minds that Reed caused the explosion.