no room for Bohunks

Have you seen Rebel without a Cause lately? What an odd movie. It seems like they are blaming James's problems on his father being henpecked. Just a lot of stuff that doesn’t hang together, though that chicken thing with the guys with their combs (remember combs? You always carried around your comb) in their mouths still stands up. Then squinty James Dean got killed on the highway and became an idol. One thing you missed, being an only child, was having sisters who followed all the teenage idols.

I wonder if you always liked folk music. The first music I remember is that Hit Parade music which was mostly the music of our parents, then there was Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and then there was this awful era when it was all these carefully groomed handsome young guys with enormous pompadours singing syrupy love ballads, then the Beatles blew it all up, and then there was psychedelia, and then, well stuff I don’t really remember because I was past twenty five and not that keen on the latest hit.

I don’t remember any Cornell Park incident, had to look up the place on Google. My group didn’t go east of Western, or more than a couple blocks north of 55th, maybe west as far as the airport, but there was nothing west of the tracks, and south as far as Marquette Park. 63rd and Kedzie seemed to be the hot spot with three dimestores and a movie theater, and I seem to remember a lot of neon signs, to me it was the Las Vegas of the southwest side.

You know those primitive tribes, those hunter gatherers, typically what the teenagers do is gather in a warrior tribe and go raid other tribes, so I think that gangs are in our genes. It used to be how we chose our leaders, the bravest warriors, and got our women without inbreeding, but I am kind of pulling that last item out of my ass.

Oh I doubt if any of those hothead teens who shoot up the place have any kind of license, but they got the guns through licensed guys who bought them legally. But there we go again.

Is bullying what you mean by social crap? Well who isn’t against bullying, though it seems of late that we have made a fetish of it. It does seem to have a social use though. When you have a group and a couple of them discover that they both don’t like a third, it brings them closer together, and then others join in to be in with the in crowd, and then it gets to a state that even guys who like the victim don’t dare stand up for him, lest they go into the barrel too. Not a pretty thing I admit.

That verbal stuff is strong. One of the worst problems I had keeping order in the classroom is that one kid would say something about another, and that kid would react, and then there goes that whole lesson in single digit addition. I would take the kid aside, don’t pay attention to what others say, sticks and stones and all that rot, but the kid would just shake his head like I didn’t know what I was talking about. And thinking about it now, I guess I didn’t, because if the kid let one kid pick on him and he didn’t say anything, then another would join in, then another.

The way we climbed out of our hunter gatherer days is that we have institutions, like the police, where if somebody punches you, you don’t have to punch him back, you can go to the police, but as you get poorer and poorer, the institutions fade away until if you don’t protect yourself, nobody else will.

I just don’t see what there is to say about this latest set of ideas you have about kicking people out of their houses and making them go back to someplace they came from before, especially since I don’t see you volunteering to be kicked out. It’s wildly impractical and morally reprehensible. I don’t know when your people came over, but if it was like mine, sometime after the civil war, there were a lot of people then saying that we were all out of room for a bunch of stoopid Bohunks.