Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Read Online Free Page A
Author: Anna Quindlen
Tags: Usenet
of Congress as the home of idealists, but thinking like that makes you feel awfully foolish. America’s cities will prosper when America’s prosperous citizens demand it. When they remember their roots.
I’ve walked many times down blocks like the one on which my father grew up. I’ve been a poverty tourist with a notebook, but I never felt ashamed of it until now.
On that little street were the ghosts of the people who brought me into being and the flesh-and-blood kids who will be my children’s companions in the twenty-first century. You could tell by their eyes that they couldn’t figure out why I was there. They were accustomed to being ignored, even by the people who had once populated their rooms. And as long as that continues, our cities will burst and burn, burst and burn, over and over again.
A CHANGING WORLD
May 20, 1990
These are dark days for the boys of Bensonhurst. Their world is fading as fast as the summer sun over the city some of their fathers and grandfathers helped build. They are angry the way people are angry when they see a sure thing slipping through their fingers.
Life was easier a generation ago. They graduated from high school, or maybe they didn’t. It didn’t really matter, because someone from the family or the neighborhood could get them into the union or the civil service, could find them a job working construction or picking up trash.
A couple of blocks away would be the girl pretty, with hair and eyes as dark as the subway tunnels, and then there would be the wedding, and later the kids. She would serve dinner on a tray table in front of the television if the game was on, or keep it warm if the boys wanted to get together to play a little ball. She did shirts just right. Looking good was the thing when the day’s grime was scrubbed away.
That has not changed. Looking good is still important. Keith Mondello never had a hair out of place during his trial. Just looking at him you could hear the blow dryer going. Joey Fama was found guilty of murder. Keith Mondello beat the big charges but was convicted of being part of a riot. When the riot was over, a black kid named Yusuf Hawkins was dead on the Bensonhurst sidewalk. They said afterward that it ruined the Feast of Santa Rosalia.
The people of Bensonhurst will tell you the boys were protecting the neighborhood. Common sense will tell you that it doesn’t take forty guys with baseball bats to protect a city street from four teenagers looking to buy a used car. It doesn’t take a gun.
Maybe what they were after wasn’t Yusuf Hawkins at all but everything he represented. The lives the boys of Bensonhurst were banking on are as dead as Drexel Burnham Lambert, and for some of the same reasons. They liked to think they were tops in their neighborhood, and their neighborhood was tops in the city, and the city was the greatest in America, and America was the leader of the world.
All ashes.
America limps along, a superpower that, like a star high-school athlete grown middle-aged, ate too much but didn’t exercise. It carries a paunch of second-rateness.
The girls that were once compliant talk back. They go out to work, and some of them even like it. The jobs aren’t there anymore. The boys don’t like to talk of slow housing starts or municipal cutbacks. They talk of how the jobs were all given away to blacks and Hispanics. Last week in Bensonhurst one of the delis put a picture of a watermelon in the window.
While the trial was going on, a study was released showing that, after blacks and Hispanics, Italian kids are most likely to drop out of school in New York. This came as a surprise to academia, but not to Bensonhurst. The kids who go to college move away, from the neighborhood and from their families, and that’s no good.
When you say these things people will say you are anti-Italian,but ethnicity is beside the point. The boys of Bensonhurst have cousins all over America, from Irish-American boys in parts of Boston to
I’ve walked many times down blocks like the one on which my father grew up. I’ve been a poverty tourist with a notebook, but I never felt ashamed of it until now.
On that little street were the ghosts of the people who brought me into being and the flesh-and-blood kids who will be my children’s companions in the twenty-first century. You could tell by their eyes that they couldn’t figure out why I was there. They were accustomed to being ignored, even by the people who had once populated their rooms. And as long as that continues, our cities will burst and burn, burst and burn, over and over again.
A CHANGING WORLD
May 20, 1990
These are dark days for the boys of Bensonhurst. Their world is fading as fast as the summer sun over the city some of their fathers and grandfathers helped build. They are angry the way people are angry when they see a sure thing slipping through their fingers.
Life was easier a generation ago. They graduated from high school, or maybe they didn’t. It didn’t really matter, because someone from the family or the neighborhood could get them into the union or the civil service, could find them a job working construction or picking up trash.
A couple of blocks away would be the girl pretty, with hair and eyes as dark as the subway tunnels, and then there would be the wedding, and later the kids. She would serve dinner on a tray table in front of the television if the game was on, or keep it warm if the boys wanted to get together to play a little ball. She did shirts just right. Looking good was the thing when the day’s grime was scrubbed away.
That has not changed. Looking good is still important. Keith Mondello never had a hair out of place during his trial. Just looking at him you could hear the blow dryer going. Joey Fama was found guilty of murder. Keith Mondello beat the big charges but was convicted of being part of a riot. When the riot was over, a black kid named Yusuf Hawkins was dead on the Bensonhurst sidewalk. They said afterward that it ruined the Feast of Santa Rosalia.
The people of Bensonhurst will tell you the boys were protecting the neighborhood. Common sense will tell you that it doesn’t take forty guys with baseball bats to protect a city street from four teenagers looking to buy a used car. It doesn’t take a gun.
Maybe what they were after wasn’t Yusuf Hawkins at all but everything he represented. The lives the boys of Bensonhurst were banking on are as dead as Drexel Burnham Lambert, and for some of the same reasons. They liked to think they were tops in their neighborhood, and their neighborhood was tops in the city, and the city was the greatest in America, and America was the leader of the world.
All ashes.
America limps along, a superpower that, like a star high-school athlete grown middle-aged, ate too much but didn’t exercise. It carries a paunch of second-rateness.
The girls that were once compliant talk back. They go out to work, and some of them even like it. The jobs aren’t there anymore. The boys don’t like to talk of slow housing starts or municipal cutbacks. They talk of how the jobs were all given away to blacks and Hispanics. Last week in Bensonhurst one of the delis put a picture of a watermelon in the window.
While the trial was going on, a study was released showing that, after blacks and Hispanics, Italian kids are most likely to drop out of school in New York. This came as a surprise to academia, but not to Bensonhurst. The kids who go to college move away, from the neighborhood and from their families, and that’s no good.
When you say these things people will say you are anti-Italian,but ethnicity is beside the point. The boys of Bensonhurst have cousins all over America, from Irish-American boys in parts of Boston to
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