When does Destruction Equal Great Opportunities?


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It can be odd to be in a city in ruins, with dead people lying around, and there is one man looking around, grinning unusually wide, while saying to himself, “I bet this would be a great place to place a giant shopping mall.” Not unlike the way Emperor Nero took advantage of the Great Fire of Rome’s destruction to build his grand palace,  so do some people in the modern era look at the flip side of devastation as Kevin Rozario wrote about in “What Comes Down Must Go Up.” Throughout this essay in which he focuses primarily on San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, Rozario looks at the concept of creative destruction in which he defines as, “the notion that modern capitalist systems require the continual obliteration of outmoded goods and structures to clear space and make way for new production and development” (Rozario 72). He uses this concept to explain why some Americans see opportunity in disasters as it is argued that the concept does work to further expand economic growth but points out that reliance on destruction, “at times seems to create only to destroy” (Rozario 96). It is for this reasoning that I can agree with Kevin Rozario that creative destruction does work though it is an unsustainable process. Take the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake into account as San Francisco was rebuilt to be shiner and better and thus had more capital placed into it rather than out of it. Due to the city having more capital following what happened, it thus became more vulnerable as Rozario best states, “that unending growth is an environmentally unsustainable that may produce a calamity that finally buries rather than invigorates capitalism” (Rozario 95). Nothing is wrong at all about rebuilding a city though constantly rebuilding and using that as a major way to promote growth is. People want to live their lives and not worry about losing everything though as Ploopy1 commented, “it is up to the people that will determine how society is rebuilt from the ashes” (Was the Earthquake a Good Thing?). So when a disaster happens at worst of times, the creative destruction theory will truly be put to the test by the people who survive and craft the future that lies ahead of them.

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