Wouldn't Want To Go To School Today

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:00:45 -0500, Rowley
wrote:


It's real simple: treat others as you'd like to be treated.

Wonder why you folks have such a hard time graspin' the concept..

kiss their feet

Nope.

Just treat them as you would like to be treated.

No feet kissing necessary.

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:55:43 -0500, Rowley
wrote:

Way Back Jack wrote:

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:38:25 -0500, Rowley
wrote:



You say "that my parents gave it up"... How many other old timers were
still living in that area at that time - what percentage of them had
already fled to somewhere else?....


About 3/4 of the old timers had been terrorized into white flight by
1984.

So 75% upped and left and abandoned their houses.... leaving the other
25% to survive on their own....

Yeah, the ****ing old cowards. They should have been more
masochistic.

Wondering why your parents waited - didn't property values start going
down as soon as the first couple old families moved and the other people
moved into their houses?....

They didn't care about property values; they wanted to live their
lives out in peace. They wanted to get along with the incoming.

Must be the fault of them evil white folks for leaving and not letting
themselves be terrorized. (snicker)

You seem to want to blame someone - why not them?....

Das raht, Rassus .... it beez whitey's fault.

Why were there not any "good" people buying the houses that the got
sold?

Axt them, why doncha? Axt them why they preferred to seek safe places
to live.

Weren't there good well paying jobs in the area to attract people
like that?

You must not be familiar with big cities. This was a residential
neighborhood within a big city.

Maybe things are different in Bum**** Texas.

Why were all these old people's grown kids not staying in the
area to raise their own families?

The natural inclination for anyone who is young is to "move on up."

My parents grew up during the Depression in a 100% concrete jungle.

They moved on up.

I grew up in a crowded residential inner city area where each house
had a front lawn the size of a postage stamp.

My next move as a young adult to move on up might've been the
surrounding suburbs in the county that abuts the city, but I went a
step further and went rural. HEEE - HAWWW!.


Thing is - even with the experiences you had, that doesn't mean that
things are bad all over. Is this the case where you are living now -
having to dodge fire bombs and rocks?


The county is reportedly 95% white, altho I suspect it's a little less
than that, maybe 90%. So what do *you* think?

If that's true - then it is either some part of that 95% who was
terrorizing the area, or that for some reason the other 5% were made to
become concentrated into that particular area.... What does any of the
other data say? What percentage of the county was above the property
line and how many were below? If just the five percent was below - then
how did they afford to buy the houses that your parents neighbors sold them?

Verbal diarrhea and non-sequiturs.

I moved to a rural area that does not abut the city line and was
prolly 99% white in 1972. Farming was still a primary industry.
Other whites flooded the area, along with blacks who too were
terrorized from the city and of course now it's a bedroom community
where farming is quite minor. It's surprising that it's still 90%
white.

Haven't really had to dodge anything the past 35 years. One time a
white tail deer got mad at his reflection and rammed his head into a
window. Another time a turkey made a pest of himself for about a
month; terrorized the cats; and roosted on the roof even in thunder
storms, leaving behind voluminous piles of **** that slid down into
roof gutters .... but we didn't have a cricket problem that August.
There's a persistent problem with woodchucks and their burrows
alongside the eastern property line where there's a row of black
cherry and mulberry trees.

All quite tolerable vis-a-vis life in the city.

Ah - so its only city schools that you wouldn't want to go to today - or
more specifically the school in the old neighborhood that your parents
abandoned...

Huh? My folks abandoned school? Eh? My folks graduated high school
in 1939 and it wasn't the school to which you allude.

Aren't teachers required to read for comprehension?

I wouldn't want to go to any govt. school today. Even in exurbia
upper middle class white America, there are kids with hunting rifles
sniping their fellow students.

Here in Austin the reverse is happening - people are buying old homes in
poor areas and turning them into McMansions - or at least they were till
the credit dried up... the poor neighbors don't like it as it drives up
their property taxes.....

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened in the southeast section of Baltimore
known as Canton where working-class Polish people lived for a hundred
years. That neighborhood never turned black. And so yuppies moved
in, knowing that they better not set up their homesteads in black
areas. As you say, property taxes soared.

ying and yang - what goes around comes around.....

That's a different issue from what transpired in my parents'
community.

Way Back Jack wrote:
On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:55:43 -0500, Rowley
wrote:


Way Back Jack wrote:


On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:38:25 -0500, Rowley
wrote:




You say "that my parents gave it up"... How many other old timers were
still living in that area at that time - what percentage of them had
already fled to somewhere else?....


About 3/4 of the old timers had been terrorized into white flight by
1984.

So 75% upped and left and abandoned their houses.... leaving the other
25% to survive on their own....


Yeah, the ****ing old cowards. They should have been more
masochistic.


Wondering why your parents waited - didn't property values start going
down as soon as the first couple old families moved and the other people
moved into their houses?....


They didn't care about property values; they wanted to live their
lives out in peace. They wanted to get along with the incoming.

White flight ain't exactly new - given that there is even a term for the
phenomenon... I'm guessing that there was some visible tipping point
during some point.... people getting raped might have been a red flag
for most people....


Must be the fault of them evil white folks for leaving and not letting
themselves be terrorized. (snicker)

You seem to want to blame someone - why not them?....


Das raht, Rassus .... it beez whitey's fault.

IMO, it's no one person or people's fault - its simply a reveral of what
took place in the late 1800's / early 1900's.... when people flocked to
the major towns and cities for work. Tonight I watched a documentry on
"The Orphan Trains" that were operated in the early part of the 1900's...

The American Experience/The Orphan Trains
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

During that period of time a ton of immigrants and people from rural
counties flooded the cites looking for work... many ended up destitute
or dead... leaving their children (some as young as 3 years old) to
wonder the streets begging or worse... "The Children's Aid Society"
rounded them up and put them on trains and sent them out to rural states
for people to adopt...

Anyway - the point is, the cities did eventual thrive and many people
enjoyed a good life there - then the kids of jobs changed - and the jobs
started disappearing... the kids of the people living there grew up and
moved immediately to the suburbs or to rural areas - where supposedly it
was a better place to raise kids.... abandoning the city neighborhoods
to the people left who didn't have the resources to move some place
better... with the jobs gone and the people who paid the bulk of the
taxes (poor people rent not buy) - city services started to dwindle...
stores started to close, pawn shops started to pop up as well as liquor
stores....

But I imagine that you already know all that... having lived through it.


Why were there not any "good" people buying the houses that the got
sold?


Axt them, why doncha? Axt them why they preferred to seek safe places
to live.

My guess is that they sold the houses to people who didn't even live
there, but rather simply rented them to whoever for whatever that they
could get for them - and the less money that they got, the less
maintenance that they did on the rental properties....


Weren't there good well paying jobs in the area to attract people
like that?


You must not be familiar with big cities. This was a residential
neighborhood within a big city.

Even big cities are not all the same - here Houston is different than
Austin, which is different than Dallas ' Fort Worth, which is different
than San Antonio....

Maybe things are different in Bum**** Texas.

Course they are - heck we're almost a different country compared to much
of the rest of the US... there are even people here who think we made a
bad decision when we allowed the rest of the states to join up with us....

There are even groups out there working on trying to get that fixed....


Why were all these old people's grown kids not staying in the
area to raise their own families?


The natural inclination for anyone who is young is to "move on up."

Then explain all the old multi-generational houses that exist? It's my
understanding that young people moving out on their own is something
recent (last 50+ years or so)....

My parents grew up during the Depression in a 100% concrete jungle.

They moved on up.

And they left grandmaw and grandpop to fend for themselves? or even
grand-grandmama? What about the old maiden aunt - sister of grandpa? Or
did they simply shuffle them all off to the nearest old folks home? Only
to visit them on holidays...


I grew up in a crowded residential inner city area where each house
had a front lawn the size of a postage stamp.

Eh.. I got to visit the place my dad grew up in once, when I was about
9... It was a three level mutli-generational house in pennsylvania - one
that had been converted into a boarding house back during the
depression... it really had no front yard and the back yard bordered a
rail switching yard.... the nearest track was elevated to the house and
about 20 feet from the back door.... across the street in the front of
the house there was a steep drop off - about the length of a football
field which went down to the bank of allegheny river....

My next move as a young adult to move on up might've been the
surrounding suburbs in the county that abuts the city, but I went a
step further and went rural. HEEE - HAWWW!.

I've tried to do that, but even so civilization keeps getting closer and
closer.... but even going rural here has me in a small neighborhood...
where we did have just houses (think something that Jeff Foxworthy would
make fun of - for instance I have a old water heater laying in my front
yard and many of the houses here have similar old junk as lawn
ornaments), till someone bought up all the vacant lots and started
dropping rental trailers on them.... for awhile there, the rental house
next to mine had about 30 pit bulls in the back yard - one chained to
each of the trees....


Thing is - even with the experiences you had, that doesn't mean that
things are bad all over. Is this the case where you are living now -
having to dodge fire bombs and rocks?


The county is reportedly 95% white, altho I suspect it's a little less
than that, maybe 90%. So what do *you* think?

If that's true - then it is either some part of that 95% who was
terrorizing the area, or that for some reason the other 5% were made to
become concentrated into that particular area.... What does any of the
other data say? What percentage of the county was above the property
line and how many were below? If just the five percent was below - then
how did they afford to buy the houses that your parents neighbors sold them?


Verbal diarrhea and non-sequiturs.

I moved to a rural area that does not abut the city line and was
prolly 99% white in 1972. Farming was still a primary industry.
Other whites flooded the area, along with blacks who too were
terrorized from the city and of course now it's a bedroom community
where farming is quite minor. It's surprising that it's still 90%
white.

Give it time.... if the city is as bad as you say it is - it get
abandoned... either that or someone will come in and do gentrification
on it and raise all of the property taxes and the costs associated with
living in the area - which will then displace the poor people who will
then move out your way - where a lot of those people who gave up farming
will sell off their land to people who will put up low-income
multi-family housing..... again, this ain't something new that's never
happened before... it's even happening here....

First you will get a couple of the big box stores (if you haven't
already), then the apartment complexes will start popping up....


Haven't really had to dodge anything the past 35 years. One time a
white tail deer got mad at his reflection and rammed his head into a
window. Another time a turkey made a pest of himself for about a
month; terrorized the cats; and roosted on the roof even in thunder
storms, leaving behind voluminous piles of **** that slid down into
roof gutters .... but we didn't have a cricket problem that August.
There's a persistent problem with woodchucks and their burrows
alongside the eastern property line where there's a row of black
cherry and mulberry trees.

All quite tolerable vis-a-vis life in the city.

Ah - so its only city schools that you wouldn't want to go to today - or
more specifically the school in the old neighborhood that your parents
abandoned...


Huh? My folks abandoned school? Eh? My folks graduated high school
in 1939 and it wasn't the school to which you allude.


Then you're talking about the school where you currently are living? The
rural school - that's just sad that it should be that scary.....


Aren't teachers required to read for comprehension?



I wouldn't want to go to any govt. school today. Even in exurbia
upper middle class white America, there are kids with hunting rifles
sniping their fellow students.

Heck, according to tonight's news you ain't even safe in church.....

Here in Austin the reverse is happening - people are buying old homes in
poor areas and turning them into McMansions - or at least they were till
the credit dried up... the poor neighbors don't like it as it drives up
their property taxes.....


Yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened in the southeast section of Baltimore
known as Canton where working-class Polish people lived for a hundred
years. That neighborhood never turned black. And so yuppies moved
in, knowing that they better not set up their homesteads in black
areas. As you say, property taxes soared.


ying and yang - what goes around comes around.....


That's a different issue from what transpired in my parents'
community.

Eh...

Martin

Way Back Jack wrote:

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:00:45 -0500, Rowley
wrote:



It's real simple: treat others as you'd like to be treated.

Wonder why you folks have such a hard time graspin' the concept..


kiss their feet


Nope.

Just treat them as you would like to be treated.

No feet kissing necessary.


And how has that worked for you so far?.....

Martin

(Way Back Jack) wrote:
Yup. We kicked ass after school; always playing some kind of game or
sport, until supper.

After supper, the school books came out. Dad saw to it.

Mine didn't. He usually worked swing shift, though later in his career
he ended up on graveyard shift.

And mine wasn't hardly rare.

Yep, the destruction of the family unit began with Uncle Lyndon.

Clearly not. The destruction of the family unit began with the end of
the family farm and the family business as the basic units of American
economic society.

Nope, the destruction during my lifetime commenced when LBJ gave us
his Great Society. The OOWs bear me out; not that I need them.

OOWs occurred before then, but were covered up. It has only been in
the last couple of decades that single mothers living in an extended
family would be identified as an out of wedlock parent.

There were also a lot of teen marriages that in recent years would be
forbidden. I've been scanning old newspapers for genealogical
information, and there were a few 13 year old girls getting married.
In Texas, 15 and 16 year old marriages were common. They would be out
of wedlock today because society wants the kids to NOT get married and
to stay in school.

Social problems and public policy: deviance and liberty By Lee
Rainwater, on Google Books, p 110-111
http://books.google.com/books?id=DzXZD8xGJ8IC
indicate that the OOW rate started rising in the 1940s, not in the
1960s.

http://www.popline.org/docs/0239/724660.html
written in 1972, says that the OOW rate has been rising since 1920,
and says that the largest factor in this has been improved health
ca
Trends in the number of illegitimate births per 1000 unmarried women
aged 15-44 during the period 1920-1968 are examined. With few
exceptions, the ratio of illegitimate to total births has risen among
both white and nonwhite populations since 1920. It is estimated that
improved health conditions have been responsible for 75% of nonwhite
and 31% of the white increase in illegitimacy between 1940-1960.
During this period, contraception and abortion use has not declined
and sexual activity has increased relatively little.

In any event, much of the reason for the increase in OOW as a
percentage of births is that the birth rate IN wedlock dropped through
the floor. The birth rate OOW has also dropped, but not by as much.

But of course, I don't think that OOW births are that symptomatic
anyway. What matters is whether the kids are raised by one parent or
by two. A kid born in wedlock who parents divorce a couple years
later probably is worse off than a kid born out of wedlock, when the
parents get married a couple of years later.

lojbab
---
Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist
Lojban language www.lojban.org

On Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:22:21 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:

(Way Back Jack) wrote:
Yup. We kicked ass after school; always playing some kind of game or
sport, until supper.

After supper, the school books came out. Dad saw to it.

Mine didn't. He usually worked swing shift, though later in his career
he ended up on graveyard shift.

And mine wasn't hardly rare.

He was part of the family.

My dad went to college at night but he still "saw to it" that the
homework was done.

Yep, the destruction of the family unit began with Uncle Lyndon.

Clearly not. The destruction of the family unit began with the end of
the family farm and the family business as the basic units of American
economic society.

Nope, the destruction during my lifetime commenced when LBJ gave us
his Great Society. The OOWs bear me out; not that I need them.

OOWs occurred before then, but were covered up. It has only been in
the last couple of decades that single mothers living in an extended
family would be identified as an out of wedlock parent.

There were also a lot of teen marriages that in recent years would be
forbidden. I've been scanning old newspapers for genealogical
information, and there were a few 13 year old girls getting married.
In Texas, 15 and 16 year old marriages were common. They would be out
of wedlock today because society wants the kids to NOT get married and
to stay in school.

Social problems and public policy: deviance and liberty By Lee
Rainwater, on Google Books, p 110-111
http://books.google.com/books?id=DzXZD8xGJ8IC
indicate that the OOW rate started rising in the 1940s, not in the
1960s.

http://www.popline.org/docs/0239/724660.html
written in 1972, says that the OOW rate has been rising since 1920,
and says that the largest factor in this has been improved health
ca
Trends in the number of illegitimate births per 1000 unmarried women
aged 15-44 during the period 1920-1968 are examined. With few
exceptions, the ratio of illegitimate to total births has risen among
both white and nonwhite populations since 1920. It is estimated that
improved health conditions have been responsible for 75% of nonwhite
and 31% of the white increase in illegitimacy between 1940-1960.
During this period, contraception and abortion use has not declined
and sexual activity has increased relatively little.

In any event, much of the reason for the increase in OOW as a
percentage of births is that the birth rate IN wedlock dropped through
the floor. The birth rate OOW has also dropped, but not by as much.

But of course, I don't think that OOW births are that symptomatic
anyway. What matters is whether the kids are raised by one parent or
by two. A kid born in wedlock who parents divorce a couple years
later probably is worse off than a kid born out of wedlock, when the
parents get married a couple of years later.

OOWs and single-parent rates are running neck-and-neck, last I saw.

At any rate, back to the 50s, there were a few war widows but single
parents were in the distinct minority.

Funny how leftist journals can lie and skew data though.

We're not making much progress here.

Take your time. Read ... absorb .... comprehend .... contemplate
.... and then ask relevant questions.

Try again.



On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:00:08 -0500, Rowley
wrote:

Way Back Jack wrote:
On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:55:43 -0500, Rowley
wrote:


Way Back Jack wrote:


On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:38:25 -0500, Rowley
wrote:




You say "that my parents gave it up"... How many other old timers were
still living in that area at that time - what percentage of them had
already fled to somewhere else?....


About 3/4 of the old timers had been terrorized into white flight by
1984.

So 75% upped and left and abandoned their houses.... leaving the other
25% to survive on their own....


Yeah, the ****ing old cowards. They should have been more
masochistic.


Wondering why your parents waited - didn't property values start going
down as soon as the first couple old families moved and the other people
moved into their houses?....


They didn't care about property values; they wanted to live their
lives out in peace. They wanted to get along with the incoming.

White flight ain't exactly new - given that there is even a term for the
phenomenon... I'm guessing that there was some visible tipping point
during some point.... people getting raped might have been a red flag
for most people....


Must be the fault of them evil white folks for leaving and not letting
themselves be terrorized. (snicker)

You seem to want to blame someone - why not them?....


Das raht, Rassus .... it beez whitey's fault.

IMO, it's no one person or people's fault - its simply a reveral of what
took place in the late 1800's / early 1900's.... when people flocked to
the major towns and cities for work. Tonight I watched a documentry on
"The Orphan Trains" that were operated in the early part of the 1900's...

The American Experience/The Orphan Trains
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

During that period of time a ton of immigrants and people from rural
counties flooded the cites looking for work... many ended up destitute
or dead... leaving their children (some as young as 3 years old) to
wonder the streets begging or worse... "The Children's Aid Society"
rounded them up and put them on trains and sent them out to rural states
for people to adopt...

Anyway - the point is, the cities did eventual thrive and many people
enjoyed a good life there - then the kids of jobs changed - and the jobs
started disappearing... the kids of the people living there grew up and
moved immediately to the suburbs or to rural areas - where supposedly it
was a better place to raise kids.... abandoning the city neighborhoods
to the people left who didn't have the resources to move some place
better... with the jobs gone and the people who paid the bulk of the
taxes (poor people rent not buy) - city services started to dwindle...
stores started to close, pawn shops started to pop up as well as liquor
stores....

But I imagine that you already know all that... having lived through it.


Why were there not any "good" people buying the houses that the got
sold?


Axt them, why doncha? Axt them why they preferred to seek safe places
to live.

My guess is that they sold the houses to people who didn't even live
there, but rather simply rented them to whoever for whatever that they
could get for them - and the less money that they got, the less
maintenance that they did on the rental properties....


Weren't there good well paying jobs in the area to attract people
like that?


You must not be familiar with big cities. This was a residential
neighborhood within a big city.

Even big cities are not all the same - here Houston is different than
Austin, which is different than Dallas ' Fort Worth, which is different
than San Antonio....

Maybe things are different in Bum**** Texas.

Course they are - heck we're almost a different country compared to much
of the rest of the US... there are even people here who think we made a
bad decision when we allowed the rest of the states to join up with us....

There are even groups out there working on trying to get that fixed....


Why were all these old people's grown kids not staying in the
area to raise their own families?


The natural inclination for anyone who is young is to "move on up."

Then explain all the old multi-generational houses that exist? It's my
understanding that young people moving out on their own is something
recent (last 50+ years or so)....

My parents grew up during the Depression in a 100% concrete jungle.

They moved on up.

And they left grandmaw and grandpop to fend for themselves? or even
grand-grandmama? What about the old maiden aunt - sister of grandpa? Or
did they simply shuffle them all off to the nearest old folks home? Only
to visit them on holidays...


I grew up in a crowded residential inner city area where each house
had a front lawn the size of a postage stamp.

Eh.. I got to visit the place my dad grew up in once, when I was about
9... It was a three level mutli-generational house in pennsylvania - one
that had been converted into a boarding house back during the
depression... it really had no front yard and the back yard bordered a
rail switching yard.... the nearest track was elevated to the house and
about 20 feet from the back door.... across the street in the front of
the house there was a steep drop off - about the length of a football
field which went down to the bank of allegheny river....

My next move as a young adult to move on up might've been the
surrounding suburbs in the county that abuts the city, but I went a
step further and went rural. HEEE - HAWWW!.

I've tried to do that, but even so civilization keeps getting closer and
closer.... but even going rural here has me in a small neighborhood...
where we did have just houses (think something that Jeff Foxworthy would
make fun of - for instance I have a old water heater laying in my front
yard and many of the houses here have similar old junk as lawn
ornaments), till someone bought up all the vacant lots and started
dropping rental trailers on them.... for awhile there, the rental house
next to mine had about 30 pit bulls in the back yard - one chained to
each of the trees....


Thing is - even with the experiences you had, that doesn't mean that
things are bad all over. Is this the case where you are living now -
having to dodge fire bombs and rocks?


The county is reportedly 95% white, altho I suspect it's a little less
than that, maybe 90%. So what do *you* think?

If that's true - then it is either some part of that 95% who was
terrorizing the area, or that for some reason the other 5% were made to
become concentrated into that particular area.... What does any of the
other data say? What percentage of the county was above the property
line and how many were below? If just the five percent was below - then
how did they afford to buy the houses that your parents neighbors sold them?


Verbal diarrhea and non-sequiturs.

I moved to a rural area that does not abut the city line and was
prolly 99% white in 1972. Farming was still a primary industry.
Other whites flooded the area, along with blacks who too were
terrorized from the city and of course now it's a bedroom community
where farming is quite minor. It's surprising that it's still 90%
white.

Give it time.... if the city is as bad as you say it is - it get
abandoned... either that or someone will come in and do gentrification
on it and raise all of the property taxes and the costs associated with
living in the area - which will then displace the poor people who will
then move out your way - where a lot of those people who gave up farming
will sell off their land to people who will put up low-income
multi-family housing..... again, this ain't something new that's never
happened before... it's even happening here....

First you will get a couple of the big box stores (if you haven't
already), then the apartment complexes will start popping up....


Haven't really had to dodge anything the past 35 years. One time a
white tail deer got mad at his reflection and rammed his head into a
window. Another time a turkey made a pest of himself for about a
month; terrorized the cats; and roosted on the roof even in thunder
storms, leaving behind voluminous piles of **** that slid down into
roof gutters .... but we didn't have a cricket problem that August.
There's a persistent problem with woodchucks and their burrows
alongside the eastern property line where there's a row of black
cherry and mulberry trees.

All quite tolerable vis-a-vis life in the city.

Ah - so its only city schools that you wouldn't want to go to today - or
more specifically the school in the old neighborhood that your parents
abandoned...


Huh? My folks abandoned school? Eh? My folks graduated high school
in 1939 and it wasn't the school to which you allude.


Then you're talking about the school where you currently are living? The
rural school - that's just sad that it should be that scary.....


Aren't teachers required to read for comprehension?



I wouldn't want to go to any govt. school today. Even in exurbia
upper middle class white America, there are kids with hunting rifles
sniping their fellow students.

Heck, according to tonight's news you ain't even safe in church.....

Here in Austin the reverse is happening - people are buying old homes in
poor areas and turning them into McMansions - or at least they were till
the credit dried up... the poor neighbors don't like it as it drives up
their property taxes.....


Yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened in the southeast section of Baltimore
known as Canton where working-class Polish people lived for a hundred
years. That neighborhood never turned black. And so yuppies moved
in, knowing that they better not set up their homesteads in black
areas. As you say, property taxes soared.


ying and yang - what goes around comes around.....


That's a different issue from what transpired in my parents'
community.

Eh...

Martin

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:01:26 -0500, Rowley
wrote:

Way Back Jack wrote:

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:00:45 -0500, Rowley
wrote:



It's real simple: treat others as you'd like to be treated.

Wonder why you folks have such a hard time graspin' the concept..


kiss their feet


Nope.

Just treat them as you would like to be treated.

No feet kissing necessary.


And how has that worked for you so far?.....

I don't mind not having my feet kissed.

Way Back Jack wrote:
On Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:22:21 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:


(Way Back Jack) wrote:

Yup. We kicked ass after school; always playing some kind of game or
sport, until supper.

After supper, the school books came out. Dad saw to it.

Mine didn't. He usually worked swing shift, though later in his career
he ended up on graveyard shift.

And mine wasn't hardly rare.


He was part of the family.

My dad went to college at night but he still "saw to it" that the
homework was done.

My parents both worked (although I do remember my mother staying home
till we kids all got old enough to start going to school) - my father
like Bob's worked shift work... there were times when he worked nights
and times when he worked days...

As for homework.. well, that was pretty much left up to us... don't
think I ever remember either of my parents being too overtly interested
in if it got done or not. Not that it didn't, or least it was done on
somewhat a regular basis - enough that nobody at the school ever
complained..

And I don't recall it being any different with any of the other kids in
the neighborhood that I ran around with... and who's parents were pretty
much the same as mine... course this was the early 60's to the mid 70's...

Martin

Way Back Jack wrote:

We're not making much progress here.

Take your time. Read ... absorb .... comprehend .... contemplate
... and then ask relevant questions.

Try again.

Yawn.. why bother? It's pretty obvious that your world view is what it
is and that ain't going to change no matter what I might say. And the
same is true for myself...

Not that it really needs to - IMO, everybody is entitled to their own
opinion.... heck, just having an opinion these days sets someone apart
from most people...

and in the end does it really matter? The world is going to keep on
keeping-on, whether we like it or not...

As Doris Day use to sing, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)"

Martin


On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:00:08 -0500, Rowley
wrote:


Way Back Jack wrote:

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:55:43 -0500, Rowley
wrote:



Way Back Jack wrote:



On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:38:25 -0500, Rowley
wrote:





You say "that my parents gave it up"... How many other old timers were
still living in that area at that time - what percentage of them had
already fled to somewhere else?....


About 3/4 of the old timers had been terrorized into white flight by
1984.

So 75% upped and left and abandoned their houses.... leaving the other
25% to survive on their own....


Yeah, the ****ing old cowards. They should have been more
masochistic.



Wondering why your parents waited - didn't property values start going
down as soon as the first couple old families moved and the other people
moved into their houses?....


They didn't care about property values; they wanted to live their
lives out in peace. They wanted to get along with the incoming.

White flight ain't exactly new - given that there is even a term for the
phenomenon... I'm guessing that there was some visible tipping point
during some point.... people getting raped might have been a red flag
for most people....


Must be the fault of them evil white folks for leaving and not letting
themselves be terrorized. (snicker)

You seem to want to blame someone - why not them?....


Das raht, Rassus .... it beez whitey's fault.

IMO, it's no one person or people's fault - its simply a reveral of what
took place in the late 1800's / early 1900's.... when people flocked to
the major towns and cities for work. Tonight I watched a documentry on
"The Orphan Trains" that were operated in the early part of the 1900's...

The American Experience/The Orphan Trains
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

During that period of time a ton of immigrants and people from rural
counties flooded the cites looking for work... many ended up destitute
or dead... leaving their children (some as young as 3 years old) to
wonder the streets begging or worse... "The Children's Aid Society"
rounded them up and put them on trains and sent them out to rural states
for people to adopt...

Anyway - the point is, the cities did eventual thrive and many people
enjoyed a good life there - then the kids of jobs changed - and the jobs
started disappearing... the kids of the people living there grew up and
moved immediately to the suburbs or to rural areas - where supposedly it
was a better place to raise kids.... abandoning the city neighborhoods
to the people left who didn't have the resources to move some place
better... with the jobs gone and the people who paid the bulk of the
taxes (poor people rent not buy) - city services started to dwindle...
stores started to close, pawn shops started to pop up as well as liquor
stores....

But I imagine that you already know all that... having lived through it.


Why were there not any "good" people buying the houses that the got
sold?


Axt them, why doncha? Axt them why they preferred to seek safe places
to live.

My guess is that they sold the houses to people who didn't even live
there, but rather simply rented them to whoever for whatever that they
could get for them - and the less money that they got, the less
maintenance that they did on the rental properties....


Weren't there good well paying jobs in the area to attract people
like that?


You must not be familiar with big cities. This was a residential
neighborhood within a big city.

Even big cities are not all the same - here Houston is different than
Austin, which is different than Dallas ' Fort Worth, which is different
than San Antonio....


Maybe things are different in Bum**** Texas.

Course they are - heck we're almost a different country compared to much
of the rest of the US... there are even people here who think we made a
bad decision when we allowed the rest of the states to join up with us....

There are even groups out there working on trying to get that fixed....


Why were all these old people's grown kids not staying in the
area to raise their own families?


The natural inclination for anyone who is young is to "move on up."

Then explain all the old multi-generational houses that exist? It's my
understanding that young people moving out on their own is something
recent (last 50+ years or so)....


My parents grew up during the Depression in a 100% concrete jungle.

They moved on up.

And they left grandmaw and grandpop to fend for themselves? or even
grand-grandmama? What about the old maiden aunt - sister of grandpa? Or
did they simply shuffle them all off to the nearest old folks home? Only
to visit them on holidays...


I grew up in a crowded residential inner city area where each house
had a front lawn the size of a postage stamp.

Eh.. I got to visit the place my dad grew up in once, when I was about
9... It was a three level mutli-generational house in pennsylvania - one
that had been converted into a boarding house back during the
depression... it really had no front yard and the back yard bordered a
rail switching yard.... the nearest track was elevated to the house and
about 20 feet from the back door.... across the street in the front of
the house there was a steep drop off - about the length of a football
field which went down to the bank of allegheny river....


My next move as a young adult to move on up might've been the
surrounding suburbs in the county that abuts the city, but I went a
step further and went rural. HEEE - HAWWW!.

I've tried to do that, but even so civilization keeps getting closer and
closer.... but even going rural here has me in a small neighborhood...
where we did have just houses (think something that Jeff Foxworthy would
make fun of - for instance I have a old water heater laying in my front
yard and many of the houses here have similar old junk as lawn
ornaments), till someone bought up all the vacant lots and started
dropping rental trailers on them.... for awhile there, the rental house
next to mine had about 30 pit bulls in the back yard - one chained to
each of the trees....


Thing is - even with the experiences you had, that doesn't mean that
things are bad all over. Is this the case where you are living now -
having to dodge fire bombs and rocks?


The county is reportedly 95% white, altho I suspect it's a little less
than that, maybe 90%. So what do *you* think?

If that's true - then it is either some part of that 95% who was
terrorizing the area, or that for some reason the other 5% were made to
become concentrated into that particular area.... What does any of the
other data say? What percentage of the county was above the property
line and how many were below? If just the five percent was below - then
how did they afford to buy the houses that your parents neighbors sold them?


Verbal diarrhea and non-sequiturs.

I moved to a rural area that does not abut the city line and was
prolly 99% white in 1972. Farming was still a primary industry.
Other whites flooded the area, along with blacks who too were
terrorized from the city and of course now it's a bedroom community
where farming is quite minor. It's surprising that it's still 90%
white.

Give it time.... if the city is as bad as you say it is - it get
abandoned... either that or someone will come in and do gentrification
on it and raise all of the property taxes and the costs associated with
living in the area - which will then displace the poor people who will
then move out your way - where a lot of those people who gave up farming
will sell off their land to people who will put up low-income
multi-family housing..... again, this ain't something new that's never
happened before... it's even happening here....

First you will get a couple of the big box stores (if you haven't
already), then the apartment complexes will start popping up....


Haven't really had to dodge anything the past 35 years. One time a
white tail deer got mad at his reflection and rammed his head into a
window. Another time a turkey made a pest of himself for about a
month; terrorized the cats; and roosted on the roof even in thunder
storms, leaving behind voluminous piles of **** that slid down into
roof gutters .... but we didn't have a cricket problem that August.
There's a persistent problem with woodchucks and their burrows
alongside the eastern property line where there's a row of black
cherry and mulberry trees.

All quite tolerable vis-a-vis life in the city.

Ah - so its only city schools that you wouldn't want to go to today - or
more specifically the school in the old neighborhood that your parents
abandoned...


Huh? My folks abandoned school? Eh? My folks graduated high school
in 1939 and it wasn't the school to which you allude.


Then you're talking about the school where you currently are living? The
rural school - that's just sad that it should be that scary.....


Aren't teachers required to read for comprehension?




I wouldn't want to go to any govt. school today. Even in exurbia
upper middle class white America, there are kids with hunting rifles
sniping their fellow students.

Heck, according to tonight's news you ain't even safe in church.....


Here in Austin the reverse is happening - people are buying old homes in
poor areas and turning them into McMansions - or at least they were till
the credit dried up... the poor neighbors don't like it as it drives up
their property taxes.....


Yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened in the southeast section of Baltimore
known as Canton where working-class Polish people lived for a hundred
years. That neighborhood never turned black. And so yuppies moved
in, knowing that they better not set up their homesteads in black
areas. As you say, property taxes soared.



ying and yang - what goes around comes around.....


That's a different issue from what transpired in my parents'
community.

Eh...

Martin