Detroit News gets it right with identifying Flint's aura

She's so mean but I don't care
I love her eyes and her wild wild hair
Dance to the beat that we love best
Heading for the nineties
Living in the wild wild west
The wild wild west
         -Escape Club

Well, so it isn't the nineties, but I am telling you I SAW the mean chick and "her wild, wild hair" as I drove down Grand Traverse the other day. I'm telling you, she was packing heat! 

Heck, we ALL are! 

The Detroit News got it right today with their piece, "Rampant crime gives Flint aura of wild West." My only quibble - and I mean quibble - is what took them so long??

Francis X. Donnelly opened her the insightful piece with "Nine abandoned homes were torched Monday and Tuesday, and a dozen burned in a four-hour period last month. The week before, a civil rights pioneer was killed in his upper-income neighborhood. Two weeks earlier, one of the police mini-stations erected as a solution to rising crime was burglarized. 

"Once upon a time, these things shocked residents," Donnelly said.

She got that right!

Yippee ki yea!

We're not shocked any more - most people I know are locked and loaded, no longer waiting for our 124 police officers to respond to our 911 calls for help. Yup, that's 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents.

"Vehicle City, the nickname given Flint as the birthplace of General Motors, has become the state's version of Dodge City," Donnelly writes.

DODGE CITY!! Is that GREAT writing or what??

Donnelly's piece noted, "With all of the other troubles faced by Flint, manhole covers have been disappearing. Some 80 covers have been stolen in the past few months, probably for scrap, police said. For residents, the lowly metal objects are an example of how nothing is safe from thieves. 

"A feeling of lawlessness has seeped into the city's psyche, they said."

It's the seeping that has likely led residents to take matters into their own hands. The Detroit News piece described one man who bought two Magnums, calibers .22 and .44; and owns FOUR pit bulls.

Listen, he's not the only one!

Mandy's in the backroom handing out Valium
Sheriff's on the airwaves talking to the D.J.'s
Forty-seven heartbeats beating like a drum
Got to live it up live it up
Ronnie's got a new gun.

Living in the wild wild west
The wild wild west