Rant #2,439: Release Me

"I just blocked a 'friend' that has seemingly become empowered by the Black Lives Matter rhetoric, spreading hate and hostility with nearly every post she has put up over the past several weeks.

I hated to do it, but she does not realize that she is adding to the hate by putting up these posts, and I simply cannot stand it anymore.

And anyone who truly believes that BLM is an organization thst is full of love and righteousness is no 'friend' of mine.

I believe this lady is not a bad person; however, she has had some type of personal epiphany, and her constant justification of this anarchistic, racist, anti-police and anti-Semitic organization has become a bit much to take.

See her later, if and when she realizes that what she is doing is not only wrong, but wholly misguided."

Journalism 101: Never begin a story with a quite unless it is a strong one.

Well, I can't be any stronger with my words than what I just put up here, so I think I would pass muster with my Journalism 101 teachings.

And yes, it is painful.

It is painful on a number of levels, one of which is that she grew up in the same place that I did, Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York.

As I have said many, many times, this was a truly special place to grow up in during the early to mid-1960s and into the early 1970s.

In our own way, we were the "Garden of Eden" that everyone dreams about, a then-new community where blacks and whites lived together as one, single community. And we did smack dab in the middle of one of the largest, oldest and proudest black communities in the country.

There were cracks in this dream neighborhood from the very beginning--many in the existing community did not want us there, and us meaning white people, "infiltrating" their community--and on the other side, there was some racial disharmony in the construction area, as few blacks were employed to build the place from the ground up, much of this having to do with the New York City unions not welcoming many people of color with open arms back then to begin with.

Anyway, the 20 buildings rose from the ashes of the old Jamaica Race Track, and yes, during the early years of the development--from late 1963, right after the JFK assassination, through 1967 or so--this was the perfect community to grow up in, espcially if you were a kid of my age.

There were seemingly thousands of kids around my age who lived in the development--mainly white and Jewish, making up the racial makeup of the city's unions at the time, but with plenty of kids of color too--and we all somehow lived together without many major occurrences inside the development.

Of course on the outside, even though the development brought needed services to an underserved commuity--such as schools, supermarkets and various health services--we were looked at as the enemy. And I found out years later that the outside community often looked at those blacks living inside the community as "Uncle Toms," traitors to their own race.

Then the late 1960s hit, and as there were changes occurring in our society, there were changes happening in Rochdale Village.

Between constant teacher strikes and the murder of Martin Luther King, the old neighborhood was coming down in flames. Eve had bitten the apple, and the neighborhood that we all loved as not the same neighborhood that we had moved into just a few years prior.

from 1969 and until my family--and hundreds of other families--moved out of the place in 1971 and throughout the early 1970s, the place had become an anarchy in and of itself.

Lawlessness and wrecklessness had replaced harmony in this neighborhood, with gangs of people from the outside terrorizing residents, using us as their playthings to rob and steal from.

The security force was just that and it was above their pay grade to do anything much but drive around in what we called "Roach Coaches"--motorized mini0cars--and terrorize kids for no rhyme or reason.

The schools--and primarily, the junior high school, I.S. 72--had become the centers of the recklessness, and as students, we were being educated in fear--fear of pins being thrust into us for absolutely no reason but folly, fear of being mugged of our money, fear of rebellion, as when a certain faction of the school took it over for one day after an assembly that was supposed to be a display of talent, but ended up becoming a Black Power rally that scared not just us white kids, but our fellow black students and also the teachers.

White kids and white teachers were getting attacked on a regular basis in the school--I remember one heinous incident where in my speech class, a visibly pregnant teacher had the class interrupted when a kid came in who did not belong in the class and started to fondle the teachers enlarged belly--and we started to put our money in our shoes for safe keeping.

There was a PTA meeting that was attended by both black and white parents, and my mother firmly remembers the message that the principal had for all the attendees: "GET OUT OF THIS ENVIRONMENT WHILE YOU CAN."

He was being honest. He had lost control of the school, and the neighborhood had lost control of itself to those who did not want us there--both black families and white families--in the first place.

"All I find, all I keep" became the buzz phrase of the school and the neighborhood, and once word got out that we kept our money in our shoes, the shoes came off, and the money was found. I remember incident during lunch break where my friend actually had his shoes stolen, along with the money contained in those shoes.

And then there was one incident, where my sister was waiting on line in the cafeteria to purchase something, and in plain sight of teachers and other adults, a kid put his hands down her "hot pants" and assaulted her. Nothing at all was done, and I mean nothing.

Outside of school, young teenagers rode around ther community on bicycles, two to a bike, and if you were walking alone, you would ge open to getting jumped and robbed. Yes, it happened to me.

I also remember gangs of kids robbing some people I knew of their Halloween candy, by hiding in the stairways of our building, waiting to see Halloween revelers, and the attacking them.

Parents were also being attacked. I remember one incident where my mother was waiting in the hallway for my sister to get off the bus taking her to Hebrew School. It was the evening, and the community had had its spate of rapists and others attacking young people, so it was not an uncommon experience for parents to wait for their children to come home after various activities, especially those happening in the evening.

My mother waited like she always did, and a security guard told her she couldn't wait for my sister to get off the bus--and he used the most vile, racist and anti-Semitic language to fully explain his actions.

Mix this anarchy with a rising drug problem, and is it any wonder why people moved out in droves in the early 1970s?

And now I see anarchy happening in our streets now, and that gets me back to my main point, about "unfriending" someone who i believe has gone off the deep end, and why it hurt me so much to do so.

During those horrid times in the late 1960s that my neighborhood experienced, my sister and I had numerous friends, and numerous friends of all colors.

For boys, we just wanted enough people to make up teams to play baseball or stickball or punchball, and no, we really did not see color at all. For girls, it was inclusivity at the best level, as these young ladies were very involved in the Camp Fire Girls and the Girl Scouts and other activities that were open to anybody who wanted to join, black and white alike.

Anyway, when Martin Luther King was murdered, that horrid incident seemed to be the tipping point of the development, and the ideals it was created upon were completely out the window when this leader was slain.

As I said, my sister had friends both black and white. One day, one of her black friends came to our house seemingly to play dolls or listen to records or talk about boys, stuff that they had always done together previously.

The girl came into the kitchen of our apartment and was crying, with tears coming out of her eyes like waterfalls.

My mother asked what was wrong, and my sister seemed concerned and tried to comfort her.

The girl said to my mother, "My mother had told me that I can't come here ever again," and we knew exactly what she meant.

Martin Luther King was in the ground, as was the hopes and aspirations of Rochdale Village, which seemed to go with him when he was senselessly murdered.

We never saw the girl again in our home.

I don't remember clearly, but was that girl the same girl, now as an adult, that I unceremoniously dropped yesterday as a Facebook "friend?"

I don't know, and I will never know for sure, but adding two and two together, I believe it was the same girl.

And that made it even more difficult to drop her, but it is even more incredible that she buys into the BLM philosophy, and buys into it more than 50 years after she came into our kitchen with tears in her eyes.

So when others tell me that organizations like BLM are all flowers and roses, I tell them that I have lived in an anarchy myself, experienced what goes on in an anarchy, and when i see an anarchy, I know an anarchy ...

And in spite of BLM becoming seemingly as mainstream as baseball and apple pie, I don't want any part of it, and I don't want any part of anything that BLM has to say.

I just remember that beautiful little girl crying so in our kitchen ...