I long ago understood that generalizations about Oakland are most of them pretty useless. I've lived here for going on forty years. It's a city of about 400,000, and it breaks down into twenty-five to thirty distinct neighborhoods many of which haven't a lot in common. For many years I lived in "The Rockridge" (and lordie, I'd love to go back, but a realtor with a flaming sword bars my way), which is today an overwhelmingly white, prosperous, forty-plus demographic. Since late in the last century I've lived at the northwestern end of Lake Merritt in a rapidly gentrifying but still far more demographically heterogeneous part of town. At the other end of the lake we have "International Avenue," formerly "East Fourteenth Street," which was rechristened earlier in the century in the unrealistic hope that people would cease associating the area with drive-by shootings. The locals did not cooperate. If just a few areas are taken out of the mix, the rest of Oakland does not look anything like so grim when the stats are crunched.

Nevertheless, I go to and fro in my highly diverse neighborhood without much concern as to what goes on to the southeast and the west in My Fair City. I'm frankly indifferent to them-on-them crime, as long as real people are left alone. Yes, I've had the barrel of a TEC-9 placed against my left occipital lobe, and this might have turned out badly, but I'd been a resident here for over thirty years before that happened.

As to the stump broke Mississippians, I wish them all the best and look forward to never setting foot in the state.

cordially,

...is at odds with my distant impression. I won't believe you.

I'd never elect to live in that cultural/political/climatic hellhole. It's better in California. But don't tell anyone.

cordially,