I don't remember ever sitting through the whole movie "Rebel Without a Cause", I just remember that one scene where those guys were driving their cars off a cliff. I was passing by the TV on my way to someplace else when my parents were watching it, and they said I should watch it too because it was a classic. I sat down and watched those guys driving their cars off that cliff, and then I said, "This is a movie about crazy people." and continued on my way to wherever it was I had been heading. We had recently watched another old classic about crazy people, "The Snake Pit", and I was in no mood for another one like that at the moment.
I was not an only child except for the first three and a half years of my life. Remember my sister Sue? Don't feel bad, I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age.
I remember watching "The Hit Parade" on TV and liking it. My favorite time was when "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" was number one for a long stretch. I don't remember exactly how long, but it broke every record in the book. I always liked classical and folk music, and never developed an interest in the popular teen aged stuff.
We were pretty young when the Cornell Park thing went down, and the kids involved were all much older. All I know is that there was a friendly neighborhood rumble that got out of control and somebody got killed. The first I heard of it was at school, where kids were discussing it in hushed tones with a touch of reverence in their voices. The reason I remember Champy Reese was that his name was bandied about more than any of the others. I never met the guy myself, but a lot of the other kids at Sawyer seemed to know him. I later heard from my parents about the kid from Elsdon who was involved. Funny that I don't remember his name because I knew him from church. I want to say that he was a Vondrak because that family was known as a pillar of the church, but I'm not sure about that. If he wasn't a Vondrak, then he was from some other highly respected family like that. Like I said, people were shocked about it. His story was that a bunch of kids were riding around with him in a car that he was driving. The other kids told him to drop them off near, but out of sight of, the park. They didn't tell him what they were planning, but said they would be back shortly. When they came back, they jumped into the car and told him to "Drive!" and he drove.
I think you're right when you say that we've got gangs in our genes. That's what Medieval feudalism was all about, you know. We tend to glamorize it with all those knights in shinning armor, but it was basically just gang warfare. "West Side Story" was based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, and I think what they were trying to say was that people have not changed all that much since those days. I read somewhere that gangs tend to form whenever police protection is non existent or ineffective. It's like you said, people don't have anybody else to protect them so they feel like they have to protect themselves. I understand that's how the original Mafia got started in Sicily. Like the urban gangs of today, they later evolved into a business enterprise when they found out they could make money selling things that people couldn't buy elsewhere.
Bullying is one kind of social crap, but not all social crap is bullying. The guys I knew in the army and the paper mill weren't all that mean to each other, they just talked tough as kind of a social bonding ritual. What used to depress me about it was it seemed like some of them didn't know any other way to relate to people. When you do anything long enough, and everybody else around you does it too, it eventually becomes the new normal. I think I told you before that, in the army, we used to joke about being afraid that we would go home some day, sit down at the family dinner table, and casually say, "Pass the fucking salt!"
I know that America was built by immigrants, and that it's supposed to be "the melting pot", and I don't have a problem with that. It just seems that there is a lot more hatred being expressed today than there used to be. One reason for that might be that people are jammed together with other people that they would rather not be around. If we could spread them all out and give each one his own domain, maybe they wouldn't be so cranky with each other. I thought that the proposal to annex Central America was an innovative approach. Since these people seem to want to live in the United States, let's bring the United States to them. They wouldn't have to sneak into the country if they were already here, and they wouldn't be outsiders anymore, they would be Americans. Of course, it would have to be voluntary, they'd have to vote on it and, who knows, they might go for it. Getting our own people to accept it might be a tougher sell. I read on Wiki that Haiti has asked us to annex them at least once, and our congress turned them down. Anyway, I don't see the harm in just talking about it. Like I said in the beginning, it may be impractical and impossible, but that's never stopped us before.
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