The good old days

A friend who is about 10 years older than me deplored the current era and pined for the good old days when, she said, “people didn’t lock their doors, kids respected their elders and people looked out for each other.” At which point I’m, like, WTF? Kids “respected” their elders because if they didn’t, their parents would beat them black and blue — and often did, there was no such thing as CPS to investigate child abuse, there were children who showed up at school looking like they’d been mugged and nobody did anything. I remember one kid in particular, he hung around our house because he couldn’t hang around his own house because he’d get beat up by his pop. Not that my own dad was much better, but he was at work all the time so there was that. And we certainly locked our doors when we weren’t home, if we didn’t, everything would have been stolen.

The reality is that for a large number of people, the “good old days” weren’t so good. This is especially true if you were black. The street I grew up in during the 1960’s and 1970’s had the houses of rich people up on the hill at one end, and across from them were the houses of the college professors. Moving towards the middle, you had the small homes of the working class whites. And finally at the other end was where the black people lived. You could tell the boundary because the road suddenly went from asphalt to oiled dirt and the trash by the road may or may not have been picked up at some point in the past week (the black end of the street was at the end of the garbage truck’s route, and if the truck was full, the trash there didn’t get picked up).

There was crime. People broke in to houses. There was gunfire. We got a couple of rounds through our front window one night. There was drugs. Heroin and marijuana were available, if you knew who to ask. I learned how to navigate a war zone without getting assaulted or killed, the 7-11 was a favorite destination and required going through the black end of the street to get there, which once open warfare broke out between the white trash on the white side of the line and their equivalent on the black side of the line meant you had to be careful. Occasionally the cops on the all-white police force would show up in force and sweep through the black end of the street, “nigger-knocking” as they called it, being a bunch of racist Irish who were uncouth. Everybody knew that the N-word was white trash and not to be used in civilized conversation, but there was a lot of uncivilized people who used that word and worse.

Our city ended up destroying itself with bigotry and hate. When the desegregation orders came down, they destroyed their park service because “we ain’t gonna have no mixin’ of the races in our public pools, nosirree.” They destroyed their school system by fleeing to the suburbs and starting up new all-white schools, leaving the center of the city to rot, and a city with no heart is a city with no soul. They destroyed city services because “better we have nothing than a single nigger benefit from our tax money.” The legacy of bigotry and hate caused all major industry to leave the city. There was a major oil and gas company headquartered there when I was a child. Appalled, they pulled out and moved their headquarters to Houston, taking 10,000 jobs with them. And they were just one of the companies that pulled out in that era.

The last time I was there, it was like one of those aerial photographs of Berlin in 1946 after most of the rubble had been cleared but before anything had been built in its place. It was as if the city had been bombed. There were entire neighborhoods where there was at most one or two houses on a block, and nothing left of the remaining houses other than holes in the ground where their cellars had been.

I’m failing to see the “good old days” in all this. I am glad, very glad, to have not grown up in the era of lynchings. But I did get to see a whole lot of bigotry and hate up close and personal. I see that in a lot of the criticisms of President Obama from the right, too, but at least today it’s not acceptable to call a man the N-word in public, and a black man and a white woman can marry without causing a race riot.

As far as crime goes, my neighborhood here in Santa Clara is ridiculously safe. We look out for each other and while you should definitely lock your door because of transients passing through, I’ve forgotten my door unlocked multiple times and nothing’s ever happened. And respect? Well. My twenty-something co-workers don’t respect you because of your age. But they certainly respect skill and knowledge.

I’ve seen the “good old days” up close and personal and I’ve seen now. I’ll take now, thank you very much…

– Badtux the Unsentimental Penguin

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