G8G7 (K-N2)
You have a devilish plan coming into play, do you not?
The East Coast I have found to be incredibly different from the MidWest and of course the West. The East Coast is different because of Ethnic Identities....as well as many other reasons of course.
But here there is a preponderance of Old World relationships. When I was a boy, there were Irish kids and Italian kids and so on and so forth.
There were of course some locals who were not either but in our domain they counted not, because they were not even Catholic. I remember they hated that they were of no importance to us. But in the neighborhood the logic was that they were the ones destined for a jail cell. Bigotry is bigtime in close knit neighborhoods. I did grow up in a fouled up area, perhaps many are in jail, for all I know.
Some of my best friends today are Jewish but I never met one until college. That's the way the East Coast was in my day, very separated but very tied to the Old Country, so to speak. So Italians married Italians and so on.
That's what one deals with out here, ethnic ghettoes. Odd to the outside observer. Kool as hell to the native, as we know just where to go to get Kielbasa and eggs and pick up some cannoli and grab a jar at the Irish Pub on the way home.
Offensive to most people, certainly. But that was/and still is to some extent, the lay of the land. The people who say no are usually the ones who had the expensive homes and barred the rest of us from moving in, which is also true. I remember Connie Francis could not move into a nearby town because she was Italian. These things are not so prevalent any more, but the ethnic roots are still there and so it comes up in conversation with any of us from time to time.
Perhaps the next generation will have less of these memories. But I suspect not. |
