Ugliness and visual pollution are in the eye of the
beholder.Personally, I have little trouble with billboards. True they
should be regulated as to size, location, noise and brightness, but
basically billboards are just another one of the myriad ways that
businesses use to promote their products and part of the system that
has created incredible wealth in this country. True there are many
concomitants of our economy that need fixing; poverty, crime, racism,
health care, and air and water pollution to name a few, but
billboards don't really make my list. Billboards are especially useful
for social service orgs to target at- risk populations and for small
neighborhood businesses (the ones Guy referred to as bottom feeders)
to target their geographical markets. Depending on what time period we
look at, small businesses create 75-90% of new jobs. These are the
folks who rebuilt Grand Avenue in the 70's and contributed greatly to
the dramatic increase of property values in that corridor.Hopefully,
we can work towards a similar result on Rice, Payne, E.7th, W.7th, and
other such commercial streets. Billboards can be a useful tool in
helping achieve that goal.
Some things that I find ugly and harmful to neighborhood and
community building.
1.Uncontrolled construction dumpsters. For 3 weeks, I had to look out
my apartment window at a rusty dumpster 1/3 full of pieces of wood
with nails sticking up and probably full of lead-based paint. Took 2
parking spaces and was a health hazard for the neighborhood
kids-especially with Halloween coming up- and was butt-ugly to boot.
Fortunately it disappeared while I was at work yesterday.
2.Mile high business signs-the Michelin sign on W 7th approaching
downtown which can be seen from Montreal and West 7th is a good
example.
3.McDonald's, Walmart, Blockbuster,and the like. I think of every
McDonalds as a 10,000 square foot billboard and the Blockbuster built
right up to the corner of Grand and Lexington Parkway as ugly in every
way. These stores not only have established garish architecture as an
acceptable standard (an aesthetic judgment on my part),but destroy
communities, purvey unhealthy food, illegally stifle unions,
discriminate by race and gender, sell cheap goods made in countries
with little or no
pollution controls, etc.(If anyone needs more detail on this line of
discussion, let me know or go to new rules.org for a start). This is
the kind of urban blight that I hope would command more attention from
SPIFers
The thing that really frosts me about this string ( besides how little
we all know about mental health, depression, and suicide) is the
sanctimonious and hypocritical notion that those social service
agencies that have accepted low cost or free ad space from Clear
Channel, (a despicable company in my book) are somehow evildoing
sinners. The ones I've seen lately- Suicide Prevention, Planned
Parenthood, Pro-Life Ministries, and the one that takes your old car
away and uses the money for some good purpose are trying to reach
their audience in the most cost-effective way and stretch their
limited advertising dollars The rest of us as individuals accept the
largess of large corporations and wealthy individuals who have made
their fortunes in dubious ways. Here's how it works and it's the
financial and moral equivalent of Clear Channel giving free billboard
space to non-profit community orgs or to the government.
Companies make exorbitant profits while dumping waste into our rivers,
streams and air (3M and Blandin e.g.), failing to pay decent wages to
employees (Dayton's)
making munitions and war profiteering (Honeywell), looting the
treasury and displacing Native Americans (Great Northern RR) murdering
union organizers (US Steel), making and peddling booze (Schmidt and
Phillips), logging away our forests, (Walker, Weyerhaueser), etc.After
a while, the owners who have become filthy rich (like Red McCombs)
usually form a foundation and give something to the community. It be
good P.R.,it may be some guilt-religious or otherwise, it may be a
good tax dodge, or it may actually be civic-minded altruism. The
result in the Twin Cities is a lot of art, theatre, music. libraries,
and literature funded by people and foundations whose money was made
in ways that many on this forum would find distasteful to say the
least and maybe even worse than billboards. So if you're one of those
on this forum who think Suicide Prevention shouldn't have accepted or
used billboards to get their message out or "sold themselves cheap", I
hope you'll walk the walk and stay away from the Walker, the Ordway,
the MIA, and any play or music funded in part by McKnight, Bush,
Phillips, Bremer, Target, etc. And no Carnegie libraries either. I
know you wouldn't accept subsidies from those folks for your
entertainment.
As for me: one night I was doing a reading at the Hill Library in
downtown Saint Paul. After a few words about James J. Hill as robber
baron and all-around exploiter, I looked to the sky and the ground and
said " thank you Mr.Hill,wherever you may be, for leaving us this
wonderful legacy". Similarly and as someone with some family history
of suicide and depression, I say thank you Clear Channel (rotten
bastards you may be in many ways) for putting up the Suicide
Prevention signs. As the Talmud says, "if you save even one life, it's
as if you've saved the whole world"
David Unowsky