Sections Above and Below This Page:
| |
one. A threat not only to the neighborhood's flimsy economy,
but also to the neighborhood people's values, hopes and dreams.
You see, most of these people want, more than any of you could
e~er not want, things like a pre-fab house out in the suburbs
or a pre-fab apartment or bungalow back in Puerto Rico. They're
just like all the other lower classes that came before them,
dreaming of becoming middle class with all the trimmings that go
with it. The difference between the Puerto Ricans and the others
before them is that the Puerto Ricans aren't white, so they've
become static in the lowmoney bracket, but they don't smell as
bad, therefore they're not going nowhere as fast as the black
people and are being permitted token breakthroughs here and
there.
"What I'm getting at is that their dreams of someday
makin' it out of what they regard as a sewer are very important
to them, 'n when hippies come along riffin' about how unhip it is
to make it into middle-class society 'n how easy it would've been
for them to make it, but they didn't because it was
insignificant, these lowmoney people get confused and upset
because here are these creepy longhaired punks who grew up with
meat at every meal and backyards to play in and the kind of
education which is prayed to God for, and they threw it all away
for what? To become junkies like at least one member of every
family on the Lower East Side? To live with garbage and violence
and rats and violence and no heat or hot water and violence and
disease and violence? Is that what hippies thought was the hip
thing to do with their lives? Well, to these people and their
sons and daughters who've had no alternative but to live their
lives in the disaster of the Lower East Side, there ain't nothin'
hip about junk or poverty or violence, and they have nothing but
contempt for young, educated fools who think it's exciting to
live in a world they really know nothing about, the kind of world
these kids' middle-class parents built the suburbs to protect
them from.
"However, these parents never figured their children
would attempt suicide by scaling the fortress walls of suburbia
and running to the ghettos which had become part of their
generation's fantasies--fantasy ghettos like the Haight-Ashbury
and the Lower East Side where sidewalks were more real than the
lawns of Westchester and where people were red-blooded human
beings, instead of blanched, bloodless, cardboard automatons. The
poor have no sympathy for these young whites who're searching out
what was kept hidden from them. They have none at all because of
the hippies' [end page 324]
|