Why is it that local news outlets seem to have endless resources to report on stories about long-distance wine pouring and other non-newsworthy happenings all day every day, but it takes 2-3 days to get a single, ineffective update about how the city and state are handling the crisis? To all of you who are new to the threats of joblessness, homelessness, and fiscal instability, your empty gestures are obvious. Banging pots and pans won’t get the rent paid, just like protesting without effective action behind it won’t cause change. The same people who organize protests without substantive action for social change behind those protests are encouraging you to make as much noise as you can once a day right now so that you maintain a complicit attitude toward a local political and economic system which undermines and takes advantage of the poor in order to maintain a “trickle up” status quo. A union of slumlords currently has more sway in this city than the tax-paying tenants who live here. Welcome to the Dixie of the North.