At age eight I walked every morning the perhaps six blocks to Robert E. Lee Elementary School, alone. Why not? There was nothing to be afraid of. My friends and I rode to Westover, the shopping center on Washington Boulevard, and left our bikes on the sidewalk for hours while we read comic books in the drug store. Why not? Nobody stole bikes. My family never locked the doors of the house. Why should we? There weren´t any burglars.
And in summer evenings thirty kids, girls and boys, played hide-and-seek across several blocks, and parents didn´t give it a thought. Why should they? It was safe. We were the dominant culture, the only culture, and we didn´t do pederasty, engage in gang attacks, or muggings, or drive fast on kid-littered streets. It wasn´t our way. If we had suffered a natural disaster, no one would have looted. It wasn´t what we did.
I´m not sure what would have happened if a gang of high-schoolers had robbed a candy store. It was impossible, because we didn´t do such things. A child molester? I don´t know. It would have one way or another been a case of God help him and he never would have been seen again. The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.
And now, and now…. How the hell did it happen?"........--{sometimes we are guilty of looking at the past with rose colored glasses, but a lot of this was true.]---
I am not surrendering!
I remember playing “chase” in our apartment complex in the early 70’s - basically two teams playing hide and seek. No one thought anything of it. We were safe, and we had a blast. I would be uncomfortable letting kids do that now.
The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.
Then we became enlightened, and stood for nothing, what a wonderful world it has become...
It will only change when we tell the left no and start not to be so “tolerant”. We must set the tone and topic of the debate and not allow the “enlightened” to change it. They have no defense of their positions, they can only call you names and attempt to change the subject...
Some things cannot be denied, I never had a house key to my mother’s home that I grew up in, and we just left our car keys in the car usually, as teens.
I parked downtown for shopping, or college, or a movie, and kept the car windows down, this was in Houston.
I grew up in the same era, graduating H.S. in 1963. As a child, on the West side of Chicago, my friends and I had free reign to roam the alleys and gangways for 3,4,5 blocks away from our homes. After dinner roamings of the neighborhood ended when the first street light came on. My parents and their friends were good, decent people. No divorce, no domestic violence, no debt. Everyone lived within their means and had a nice life. I remember in the late 50’s? when a child was kidnapped in Chicago and the whole city shut down and then mourned when she was found in a Forest Preserve. It was a one of a kind crime never to be committed again for many years.
What happened? What happened? 1960’s Blacks moved into my neighborhood. I saw two murders, one across the street from my house, gang related. White people fled to the suburbs for safety. We didn’t leave because of our Black neighbors, we left because of safety. Property devalued and eventually in a few short years a perfectly beautiful neighborhood turned into a slum. So what caused Black people to destroy a neighborhood and way of life? I don’t know...don’t have a clue...as this was before Johnson’s Great Society so you can’t blame it on the Plantation mentality. I don’t know...I just don’t know.
Reed was a great crime beat reporter for the Wash. Times, down to earth, insightful, honest.
His early life in Arlington paralleled mine in Baltimore where we had one crime in my neighborhood in the12 years we lived there, the infamous “Cat Burglar”. My friend and I helped the police track his footprints from my nextdoor neighbor’s house to others he tried to break into.
He got caught and did serious time. The police and courts didn’t fool around with career criminals in the late 50’s, early 60’s.
We walked to elementary, Junior High, and for some, high school, plus churches or synagogues, without any hassle except for one black group who disappeared after complaints about their criminal actions.
Garages weren’t locked, doors were left unlocked, the same for cars. People cleaned up the neighborhood. We knew the names of the postman, the Good Humor Man, and dad always left a Christmas gift for the garbage pickup men.
Leftist liberals destroyed our once peaceful and improving society. Today, they live in “toney” housing developments or gated apartments/communities, send their kids to private schools, and proceed to tell us how to live our lives.
Most never served in the military; a few, in the Peace Corps (honorably).
We are paying for their subversive undermining of our society, our principles, our culture, and even our language.
We have two chances to strike back and cripple them, 2014 and 2016. Get organized now. Get rid of phony Republicans and elect men and women of principle and integrity.
This time, take no prisoners.
I wish a life/culture on all Americans that I had when I was growing up. Nobody was killed by gangbangers, crime was almost non-existent, schools “taught”, people respected one another, drugs were unknown and Annette Funicello was “hot”.
Hell, I lived in the West and that's what it was like. We didn't lock our doors until '67 and when I was 10, I rode my back across the entire city of Tucson!
My mother was a bit tweaked about that, but she was worried about car accidents, not molesters...or gang bangers.
The former ended up in Ol' Sparky at the State pen and the latter didn't exist.
Kids now live choreographed lives run by their parents until they are in their late teens. Or else they end up in something bad.
Thanks, Baby Boomer idiots (i'm one, so I get to say that).
I grew up in the Bronx during the Ed Koch 70’s and the David Dinkin 80’s.
I took the bus or subway to school, watched cautiously for gangs, avoided drug dealers like the plague and knew damn well blacks were always looking for a reason the beat the hell out of a white boy.
Mom lived in Queens in an Irish run down neighborhood populated by a bunch of ‘plastic Paddies’. Dad lived the Bronx with the remnants of Poles/Italians. . Divorce was common and we children learned to get along with step families.
Summer heat relief meant an open fire hydrant. Children playing hide and seek may just disappear forever. We sneaked into CBGB’s to watch the Ramones and had a front row seat to the birth of Rap—Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow.
As a kid, I watched the “Bronx Burn’ live from Yankee stadium upper deck , was terrified of the Son of Sam and saw blacks wielding in public parks.
Am I nostalgia for any of this?? No way(maybe the Ramones)... All those experiences made me realize the world is one F’d up place that far to often is often painted over as to hide it.
My F’d up youth made me stronger and prepared me quite well for the world. ....
Although I enjoy and am somewhat envious about simple life of the 50’s to me and others ,it is as foreign to me as a kid growing up now who looks back at the 70’s.
Same memories for me in the 60’s. By the start of de-segregation in Seattle in 1974/1975 we saw a cultural change of violence that was shocking for us. Our parents moved us to the coastal islands where the forced bussing could not effect us. It cost them a fortune to commute but returned us to the safety we were used to.
The “culture” must have been mighty flimsy to be destroyed by so little.
Watts Riots, summer 1965. At the time I worked on a new home subdivision, in San Clemente California.
We had a young black carpenter, who lived in Santa Ana. After the riots, he remarked: “I was going up to LA to see my mother, but those blacks are shooting other blacks.”
And they still are. and of course whites, too.
Explains white flight. White flight explains the decay of cities.
I don’t know. You get horrendous crimes happening every ten years or so going way back into history. People are more cautious and protective nowadays — also less surprised when atrocities do happen.
It’s truly jaw-dropping what has happened to America. The culture has become such a poisonous, putrid cesspool. For many years, I used question what could be done to salvage the country. All the various options, from political to cultural. But over the past few years, amidst the backdrop of the media/social deification of Obama, versus the all-out savaging of an admirable Christian woman like Palin, I’ve become pretty convinced that America has dispensed with its historic greatness and basically embraced evil. All that was once good and decent is attacked and disparaged, and all that was once vile and debased is now celebrated and promoted.
Thus, my question nowadays tends to no longer be what can be done to salvage the country, but whether it’s indeed ‘worth’ salvaging.
Leftist incrementalism. One drip at a time.