what went wrong 3

I remember that nuclear thing.  I remember the air raid drills and duck and cover.  I used to take my transistor radio to bed with me and when I heard sirens I would set it on the Conelrad station (which was clearly marked on all new radios) to see if missiles were winging across the Atlantic,  I remember when the White Sox won the pennant in 1959 and Daley turned on the sirens and there was a bit of a dustup.  But for all that I was never really afraid,  I don't know why not.  Maybe because I was young and it seemed like an adventure. like the British and the V2's (which I am sure that they didn't think of as an adventure).  And it was all so far away.

What wasn't far away was Them crossing Ashland and advancing towards the tracks on the other side of Western.  Before we discovered the Kedzie-Archer bus route downtown we use to take the 55th Street bus.  It went up 55th to around State Street and then turned north and took that street downtown.  A little after Western black people would begin getting on the bus.  That is when we knew we had crossed the boundary (we called it the boundary).  As we progressed east more black people got on and certainly no white people got off.  From a casual glance it looked like a rainbow coalition, blacks and whites riding the bus downtown together, but if you looked closer you would see both sides eyeing the other warily, huddled within themselves.  There was tension but I never saw any violence or even a discouraging word.

As we moved eastward and then northwards, the neighborhoods got more and more rundown.  These had all formerly been white neighborhoods and we all knew they had looked better then.  This is what happened when black people moved into white neighborhoods, they ruined them (of course it was more complicated than that, but that is what the word was then), and that's why we had to keep them at bay, lest they ruin our neighborhoods.

I guess I believed the same things that all my neighbors believed. Who doesn't?  Somewhere around high school I became interested in science and read a lot of books, and one of the first things they said was that this idea of one race being superior to others is a bunch of hooey.  That changed my mind.  I would like to say that I made a stand against racial prejudice because of my high moral standards and belief in the dignity of man, but it was more just because I thought it was the smart thing to do, and I always liked to think of myself as smart.  I'd like to say that I made a stand, but what that amounted to was disagreeing with my friends on the subject, and when I failed to win any of them over, and indeed, saw that I was losing friends over this, I dropped the subject.

The subject is, by the way, The Failure of The Liberal Agenda and how it relates to rural people feeling denigrated and disrespected.  I have gotten a little off the subject with my biography and the subject of race, though I believe race has a big part in this.  I'll try to get closer to my subject in the next post.

To be continued.