A few points about 24/7 Wall Street ranking Birmingham as the second-worst city in America.

1. Relying on 24/7 Wall Street to tell you what's good and bad is like creating a Twitter account and calling yourself well read.

2. It's all true, in the way statistics are always sorta true. Birmingham is a poor, homicidal home to poorly educated sick people. Depending on how - and what - you see as Birmingham.

3. Everybody who has genuinely looked at Birmingham's well-being over the last 50 years has seen this coming and warned - Paul Revere style - of trouble. A house divided, as it turns out, is soon a pile of condemned rubble.

4. We know how to fix it. We have known how to fix it. And we won't.

The timing of all this -- not that timing has any bearing since 24/7 Wall Street spews numbers like old faithful and we in the media pick them up like the clap in a New Orleans brothel -- is perfect.

It is entree to the conversation we need to have again. And again. And again.

The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama just released a study, commissioned by the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, that examines the role of cooperation, or lack of it, in and around Birmingham.

The crux is no surprise. Communities that have thrived in recent decades - Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Charlotte - have found ways to unify, to cooperate as one voice instead of local towers of Babel that can't seem to talk to themselves, much less the world.

(PARCA)

And the communities that flailed and wound up on lists of the worst - Birmingham, St. Louis, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit -- are those that divide and are conquered, that are so interested in preserving local power and control that they lose the essence of who they are.

It is brutality in black and white. And red. Median income, poverty, employment and other factors are all tied up in the same broken basket of eggs. In metro areas that are more broken - like Birmingham -- "growth is slower, and social and economic problems are more concentrated," the report said.

"The negative effects of fragmentation weigh not only on the center city but also on the metropolitan area as a whole," it goes on. "The fortunes of the central city and its suburbs are interlocked."

Of course they are. Mobile should remember that as it splinters farther. Huntsville and Montgomery too.

It's easy to sit in Hoover, or Prattville, or Fairhope, or Madison, and think the nearby city has nothing to do with you. It's easy to sit in Mountain Brook or Trussville and think Birmingham's struggles have no bearing on your lives.

If Birmingham is the second-worst place to live in America, it's a reflection on all of us. And it is all our fault.

We thought about government consolidation when it was doable, and rejected it. We broke into pieces. There are 35 cities in the county, five counties that rarely speak civilly to each other, a city at political war with the suburbs and suburban legislators who still act as if they know best.

Birmingham is but 32 percent of the county population, 19 percent of the metro. And it is still expected to lead the region, to provide services for the whole while trying to protect and educate and serve a populace that is less able to pay for it than those who left town.

And it's easy to sit in downtown Birmingham, in coffee shops and hipster cafes serving pork belly and craft beer, and become angry that anyone could think Birmingham as anything but a hidden gem - as other national press has said.

Because Birmingham is the best.

And the worst.

When it should be one.