Nostalgic Amnesia
The romance with New York City’s past, is safe as a story, not as reality.
Some people just don’t want any rules. They want to drink all night on the stoop, smoke weed in playgrounds and hallways, hang out on the corner for hours, beg for change in front of McDonalds, piss in the street, hop the train… and get annoyed when cops give them a ticket for anything.
Newsflash: public drinking, possession of weed, loitering, vagrancy, theft of service have ALWAYS been against the law. You ALWAYS could get put through the system for it.
Just in the 1970s and 80s the police didn’t enforce minor laws anymore. Some were too busy being corrupt and looking the other way while drugs took over the streets. Others just stopped risking their lives for paycheck, especially after the BLA assassinated 4 cops and the FALN bombed more in the name of freedom.
Just because we grew up in a time when New York City cops didn’t enforce any laws, doesn’t mean things were better then and we should go back.
Maybe we got too used to dysfunction and law breaking as being normal. Anything less than letting people do whatever the hell they want is categorized as “oppression.”
People used to get desk appearance tickets for drinking and weed and it didn’t work to change their behavior in public. Things got worse. But putting people through the system and checking for warrants when you stopped someone for smoking weed, made criminals more discreet or leave NYC all together.
The public drinking stopped. People couldn’t buy drugs on the streets or even in hallways so openly anymore. The addicts went into hiding or to jail and that meant little kids and their mothers could actually use the playground again.
But people have forgotten.
They have forgotten how it used to be in New York. They have forgotten how it was to have to carry a gun to keep someone from taking your leather jacket. People have forgotten how it was when the cops did not show up until after you got shot. They have forgotten all of the drugs and prostitution and the robberies around 42nd Street. They have forgotten the all the junkies shooting up in Union Square park in the shadow of the abandoned S-Klein Department store. Forgotten the purse snatchings in broad daylight. Forgotten the summertime gunshots ringing across project playgrounds killing little children who just wanted to cool off in the sprinklers.
It’s kind of a nostalgic amnesia. Where the past, no matter how dysfunctional or painful, somehow becomes better than the present.
If only that were true.
I grew up in The Boogie Down Bronx and Hip-Hop jams in the park, were dangerous places. DJ’s without guns, got their equipment taken. Patrons would be robbed for their sneakers coming to and fro and even in the jam, while the MC’s rocked the mic. Break dancers, graffiti artists or the cops, were not coming to defend you or save the day back then.
You had to hold your own.
So you knew. You knew that a hoodie was the uniform of the stick up kid, and when you smelled Angel Dust coming from the direction of someone in a hoodie, you either stayed clear or were strapped yourself to handle your business. If you had jewelry or a leather, simply possessing it didn’t make it yours - unless you could defend it with your life. Or were willing to take a life defending your right to have that big gold chain.
Now, those really aren’t the good old days. They are the bad old days. But people have forgotten.
Now if you have this kind of nostalgic amnesia of how things used to be in NYC, I challenge you to go stand on Kensington and Somerset in the North Philly Badlands for 3 hours, and if you make it back unscathed, with no trouble, then you tell me if you think less enforcement of minor crimes is a good thing.
We need to check some of our “own people” who just want to do whatever they want, wherever they want and label it “freedom.”
But Freedom is not absolute. With Freedom comes great responsibility.
For those who think freedom somehow means no rules at all, maybe we should smoke weed in their houses, piss on their floors, steal their belongings and write graffiti on their apartment walls. Wonder how they would feel about that….
Be careful what you are nostalgic for New York City, you may not like the results.
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Originally published at sensiblefanatic.com on December 30, 2014.
