Yeah, Frank was a bastard, but he OUR bastard.
My grandmother didn’t have to be afraid to walk 1 block to the Acme when Frankie was running things. Later on, I remember escorting her with a baseball bat in my hands because of the “disadvantaged, underprivileged few” hanging ou ton the corner waiting to smack an old lady old the head and take her shopping money.
My mother didn’t HAVE to carry her 38 Chief’s Special when Frank was running things. She DID, however, have to carry it when Wee Willie “Burn Down Your Neighborhood” Wilson Goode was running things. And it only got worse when Brutha Street took over.
I guess things always look better when you’re looking back through the lens of a couple of decades, though. I think we tend to idealize “the good old days”, even when they probably weren’t really all that good.
Either way, I’m sick of feral, low-class gangsta scumbags and their idiotic criminal mentality. This crap stops when good people shoot them down like the animals they emulate.
The “us and dem” mentality just shows how many decades far behind Philly is compared to NYC. Again, what kept NYC from being Philly is that the wealthy stayed (and are still coming, from around the world), while the immigrants diversified the population (preventing racial power blocks a la PHL and Detroit). Philly, on the other hand, remains a black/white, mostly lower/lower middle class city with little employment base outside of the government. Rather depressing, though still not as bad as Baltimore.