Greetings,
I'm writing this in response to the ongoing fight on this message board
pertaining to
racism, minimum wage and the entire Asburysteve thread.
I recently moved to Asbury, and when I told my many friends that I was doing
so, they all
had the same reaction..."Asbury, ew. It's dangerous there" or "Asbury, you mean
that town
on the shore that has all that crime"
I was even apprenhensive to move here. A week after I signed my lease, I took
a drive to
visit my soon to be home, and had a drug dealer try and flag me down near the
Golddigger, and immediately after I got approached by a prostitute because she
figured I
pulled over for her, not because I wanted to check out my new home.
In any case, I love living in Asbury. Asbury has been a part of my life for as
long as I can
remember. But unfortunately, the good memories are mingled with the bad...tales
of
friends being attacked outside of the Stone Pony one night, having one of my
beloved
bicycles stolen, only to be spotted outside a crack den in Asbury. I'm sure we
all have such
tales of woe.
Since moving to Asbury, I've gotten to see the political in-fighting that
doesn't seem to be
making much progress. I've seen people doing crack in broad daylight in the
beautiful
Library Square Park. I've been yelled at in that park while walking my dog
because some
guy thought I was looking at him (he yelled some pretty ugly racial things at
me, then
yelled "what's the matter, you don't want a black man in your white assed
park") I have
liquor bottles and other debris on my lawn practically every morning. My
neighborhood is
filled with the same 3 or 4 prostitututes daily, and the accompanying cars that
troll around
in search of them.
What's going to happen when the new people that AP is trying to attract wind up
here?
I think there's quite a bit of good going on in AP right now, but unfortunately
that is being
overshadowed by the bad. On one hand, we have the amazing Market in the Middle
and
it's little group of flourishing restaraunts, on the other hand we have 3
people shot and
one killed just a few blocks away from where I live.
It seems to me that most of the problems in AP are drug related. AP has been
known for
decades to be a place to score drugs. The prostitutes are all drug addicts, and
the dealers
supply them. It's a vicious cycle.
Asbury is also plagued with racial seperation and racial stereotyping, which is
fueled by
things like last weeks murder, and the weekly stories that appear in local
newspapers
police blotters.
I hope Asbury doesn't suffer a similar fate to Atlantic City, where they have a
2 block wide
strip of prosperity bordering on a wasteland.
I don't know what the answers are, but I believe that Asbury needs to unite the
east and
west, and both sides need to fight the sleezy and dangerous parts of Asbury
that give us
the horrible reputation that we have.
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