"My old neighborhood has gone to hell."
The old days are gone. Demographic changes are coming fast. Uncomfortably fast.
White people over 65 are a big part of Trump's base. They remember the old days.
An old man wrote me, sending a Google map of his old Los Angeles neighborhood. He is retired union member, now a socialist. A Bernie supporter. He sent me what I consider a primary source--a report on what he experienced seventy years ago and how he feels now.
Bowman wants young Americans to understand him and people born in his era and his circumstances.
It describes the old days--his old days. He opposes Trump, but he titled the piece "Why Trump will win again."
Ralph isn't "woke," but he knows he isn't "woke" and that is his point. Neither are millions of Americans like him. America is in a period of high immigration numbers, and we have a president who has tapped into the anxiety many Americans feel. The route to the middle class has gotten harder. Many Americans are looking for someone to blame. Bernie says billionaires and a rigged system. Trump says immigrants, criminals or job stealers, bad either way.
A poem of America, by Ralph Bowman, in the manner of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
An old man wrote me, sending a Google map of his old Los Angeles neighborhood. He is retired union member, now a socialist. A Bernie supporter. He sent me what I consider a primary source--a report on what he experienced seventy years ago and how he feels now.
Bowman wants young Americans to understand him and people born in his era and his circumstances.
Ralph isn't "woke," but he knows he isn't "woke" and that is his point. Neither are millions of Americans like him. America is in a period of high immigration numbers, and we have a president who has tapped into the anxiety many Americans feel. The route to the middle class has gotten harder. Many Americans are looking for someone to blame. Bernie says billionaires and a rigged system. Trump says immigrants, criminals or job stealers, bad either way.
"Why Trump will win again."
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| Howard Motor Showroom. Now an Asian mall. |
"I was raised in what is now called Angeles Heights, Los Angeles near Echo Park. My Dad sold Buicks down town LA for Howard Automobile Co. and my mother owned a beauty shop on Sunset Blvd. We lived in a “White” neighborhood. There was one Italian across the street from us, and Mickey Cohen’s girlfriend (A Jewess), lived on the corner.
All my close relatives from Chicago lived in an apartment next to us, three families upstairs and three more families downstairs. My Dad used these expressions freely: Kike, Yid, Spick, Nigger, Chink, Dego, Wop, Polak, Jap. He was a born again Christian and a part-time store front preacher.
Mexicans had to live on the other side of Alvarado. Once in a while a big Mexican kid, appropriately named Angel, would wander into our neighborhood and line us kids up and take our lunch money. A gang member from Lil Temple would sometimes meet me on the street and take away my ice cream. I had no fear wandering down town LA at night going to Pershing Square and listening to the crazy preachers. As a kid we were allowed to catch gold fish in Echo Park with a ball of Wonder Bread on the hook.
Jews lived in West LA; Negroes lived in Watts; Mexicans lived in East LA.; Armenians ran dairy farms in Downey. None were allowed to join the Johnathon Club and many clubs. Nor could they stay at Montecito Hotel near Santa Barbara. Radio and early TV stars were Jews with new names; blacks were chauffeurs and maids in the movies; no Mexicans, few good parts for women.
And then in came Koreans from the Korean War, Vietnamese from the Vietnam War, Philippinoes when Naval bases closed, more Japanese, more Chinese, Thai from Thailand Iranians who call themselves Persians, Eastern Indians who bought motels and convenient stores, Russians from Azerbaijan. And now LA has Thai Town, Korea Town, China Town, Japanese Town, etc, replete with street signs in their native languages.
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| Cortez Street Elementary |
I had to go to a neighborhood Elementary school, Cortez Street School, full of Mexican kids because it was on the other side of Temple Blvd, the land of Mexicans. Because I didn’t read well after first grade my parents sent me to a Christian school called Culter Academy for $11.00 a month to get me away from those Mexicans. My new school had two Mexicans, Bernie Gomez and my best friend, Bob Purdy. We had one Jewish Student, my other friend, Byron Bourman.
Ask Californians here in Southern Oregon if they miss their old “white” neighborhoods. You will hear my story told again and again. 'My old neighborhood has gone to hell.'"
As an afterthought, Ralph Bowman sent me this explanation of his prose poem:
"White people in my generation have tried to get past their resentment, their anger of being taken over. They are trying to keep their mouths shut and swallow their loss of 'the old neighborhood ways.' But they don’t like adjusting to the unfamiliar faces, food smells, and being excluded from these ethnic tribes and strange languages. To ad insult to injury these new immigrants do business with each other. If you do not look like them, it takes a long time to break into their family and relative ties.
This is MY America, not theirs. Donald Trump has tapped into this anger. That is why he will win again unless the Democrats can neutralize this underlying resentment.
'Can’t we all get along?' said Rodney King after the riot sparked by an acquittal of the White cops who beat the hell out of him. How to rise above the resentment and suspicion toward these “other” Americans now in our midst before we return to more race riots is the challenge in this next election."
8 comments:
"bad either way."...?
So it's not the "rigged system" or "immigrants"? So what then?
Survival is about adapting and thriving and those slow to accept reality do neither. Migration is a worldwide phenomenon driven by economic, cultural and now climate factors. It's not something new or limited to America. Overpopulation in resource poor parts of the planet push people off the land and into cities that become crucibles of change. Migrants adopt new customs. We go out for Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc. food and those unfamiliar with burgers and fries line up at the In-N-Out. Within a generation cultural artifacts get left behind or combined with others first by artists and then by the wider population.
Neighborhoods change demographics but property values don't; those that can't move up and out should ask themselves why and consider their new neighbors aren't thrilled about them either. Poor people live closer to each other than those more prosperous and in less comfort. Poverty encourages crime, but is not the cause. Associating behavior to ethnicity is overly simplistic, but appeals to those who resist accepting the real complexities in favor of those that validate their victimhood.
"The route to the middle class has gotten harder."...? From where for whom?
A role of government, perhaps it's most important one, is to regulate the social order. Regressives do it through coercion, oppression and violence. Progressives strive for fairness, justice and above all, reason.
A binary choice? "Good people on both sides"?
Wow. Interesting that he’s a Bernie supporter. You don’t have to be woke. You just have to be angry.
Keep falling back on reason, Rick. How’s that working for you?
White straight Christian males remember the "good old days". Everyone else remembers the bad old days.
I am 78 and grew up in a mixed neighborhood in NE Portland. Well, it was mostly white, but we had Black people living near us down the long block. We had two Jewish families, one sort of upper middle class, and the other a very poor and conflicted family with neglected children. We had a Japanese family a few doors down, and as a 10 year old, I got to try on a kimono, and I felt so elegant! It is partly attitude. We kids mixed with everything there. In late grade school, one of my friends was black. She and I hated home ec together! We were partners on a field trip, to the horror of some classmates, as you had to hold hands with your partner for safety reasons. When my mother remarried we moved "up" to a whiter neighborhood. My mother would have voted for trump. She was bigoted against blacks, Jews, and others. And was angry at intellectual elites like my older brother, who was a non-out gay man and a socialist. But the irony is that she sold our old house to a Black family, who proceeded to repair and fix it up! My stepfather used all of those derogatory names for groups. When I was in high school it was the white "greasers" who hung out in the back areas of Grant High who we feared, not blacks or Hispanics.
My point is that I embraced all of those differences and found them interesting. I am not sure what made me different than the guest editorial gentleman. I think that the more people are isolated in communities with all one race and type, the more fear there seems to be. The fear seems proportionate to the distance they actually are from those "others".
I agree, tho, that the more people are forced to live too close to others, tensions rise, with the annoying noises, smells, etc.
I grew up and went to High School very close to where this map is. First of all this was not a middle class neighborhood back then (1960-1970). Don't think that immigrants brought down this neighborhood, they brought it up. All those icons are restaurants that entrepreneurs started and built in the only neighborhood they could afford. Now they are successful and have more money than the "original inhabitants" of this neighborhood - they worked for it.
In many respects the writer of this blog is correct - older people don't like change, miss the recognizable memories of the past and look for someone to blame for it.
The reality is the past is long gone. 1960 is not coming back, thank God! We (immigrants, people of color,etc.) have plenty of stories from our past where we experienced racism. I can only hope that those experiences are becoming less and if it means that part of the reason is because the older generation that is wishing for the past is moving on, then so be it.
I miss the good old days too. Back when we had a President Eisenhower who initiated an infrastructure program called the Interstate Highway system, who stood against the demagogue Joseph McCarthy, and who supported the rule of law as set by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Ed. and sent federal troops to Little Rock ensuring that black students could go to good schools. And back when we had a President Kennedy who stood up to Russia in the missile crisis, and inspired us with the space program. And back when we had a President Johnson who turned away from his own Southern racist heritage and pushed through Congress sweeping civil rights legislation and brought us Medicare. And back when we had a President Nixon who made peace with China, initiated the Environmental Protection Agency, and who with grace stepped aside when caught up in the Watergate scandal,
All flawed men, all who in addition to their achievements made towering errors, most catastrophically in Vietnam. I strongly disagreed with many of their policies and tactics, but I never doubted their devotion to this country. Would that I felt that way now.
I don't think Eisenhower "stood up to McCarthy." He didn't even protest when the good Senator accused General Marshall of being a traitorous Communist. But, in general, I agree with Art.
i hate trump. he is fucking asshole and corrupt person as well
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