Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 1079 Editor's Choice: 133
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The Good Old Days Were Never Good
[Read the article: Killing time]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]David Matthews' piece really did strike a chord with me; Me, a peer of his father, and so more in touch with those Good Old Days than with those of the 80's - although I didn't exactly miss that epoch either. The difference, I guess, was that I gew up in Washington, DC, and had there been serious gang activity on the order of today's sort, there would have been open warfare between the gangs of Baltimore and those of DC. There practically was anyway, just between the residents. It was mostly confined to talk, though. The competition between those two cities, however, represents the spirit of the "old school" gangs, two such which counted me as a member. The Takoma Park Separatists, a group of working-class youths led nominally by the late guitar genius John Fahey, and the Ridge Road Gang (now "Crew" instead of "Gang" and Black instead of White) a group of non-working-class youths, both claimed me, the latter on weekends when I spent time with my cousins in the Southeast quadrant of DC. This conveyed a sort of unearned legendary status in the Takoma Park area that kept me from getting beat up as much as I would have otherwise.
I learned early on, though, that there was another sort of gang than the territorial ones I was afiliated with in the 1950's: the "bored" sort. There was no other explanation, and these guys were partly teens but partly young adults (legally, anyway) and they were nothing more than classic ne'er do wells, truly bad people with bad parents who lived and died in inner-city DC in the late 40's and early 50's. These bored white guys were the ones truly to be feared and far more like the types Matthews talks about. The acts they committed were pointless and destructive; They were also sometimes fatal. One guy actually stabbed his mother to death in a fit of pique. In a neighborhood made up of hillbillies, Latinos, Indians and random other unlikely neighbors, these guys were a horror not unlike today's "bored" (and largely ignored - by their parents) gangsters. The next wave, of which I was part, was modeled much more on the Mexican territorial gangs and Black self-defense gangs that were all around us but never really bothered anyone but each other. As the city desegregated so did our gangs. Eventually things swung into "Chocolate City" mode and so all the white folks who had fled across the imaginary DC line were scared to death of any young person from DC, mainly because they were by then always black.
While my first weapon was a switchblade (that Latin up-close-and-personal thing, along with the Afro-Latin style of dress many of us adopted), handguns started showing up in the 60's, after I had been dragged out of DC and away from those scary Negros. Many of my new honky friends were packing. That troubled me a great deal. Then, in the 80's, the big inner city meltdown described by Matthews began. By then I had begun to revisit my roots, walking the old neighborhoods unarmed, and, since I wasn't involved in any drug dealings, was able to move unarmed and unmolested.
It's changing again, back to the wonderful old days of random acts of senseless violence just to feel something - anything. And the reason is the same: bored and ignored. Anger at one's parents can be a powerful and terrible engine of sociopathy. Don't underestimate the volatility of boredom.
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Urness Got it Right
[Read the article: GOP kisses up to liberal Chafee]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The trouble with politics is, indeed, that the plight of the poor does not change. What's worse, the definition of "poor" has become adjustable. At a time in our history when poverty is relative and so not readily distinguishable even to those so afflicted, the obscenely wealthy continue to control both parties, while we, on both sides of the aisle, continue to wring our hands over which crew's turn it is to run the lives of the poor, the nearly poor and the soon-to-be-poor. I guess the real problem with politics is that it is politics at all. If we as a nation were blessed with decent peripheral vision we would understand that it doesn't matter which party has "control" of the Senate and the House, nor of the White House, but that decent and honorable men and women who are representative of their constituency are elected. But no, instead we continue on furnishing our rut, pulling the switch back and forth, electing the same ruling class of disconnected, derealized and far-too-afluent scions of "power families." There is no Santa Claus and there is no Mister Smith to go to Washington, it seems. There is just the one cistern from which we will continue to scoop the algae off the water down there in the dark, where decent people never go.