Idiotic!

Lawrence Auster: Remembering a white working class neighborhood of the mid twentieth century

How idiotic these "race realist" types are! -- the reason "white working class neighborhood of the mid twentieth century" no longer exist is because no one wants to be a "white working class" person living in a "white working class neighborhood", and certainly not with a "mid twentieth century" lifestyle ... but they do seem to want someone else to be that and live there and at that level of material deprivation. As witness both the item of May 27 and the addition of May 28.

Lamenting the passing of "the old neighborhood" -- that you willingly moved away from, because you could lead an easier and more materially abundant live elsewhere -- makes no more sense than people born in the big, empty rectangular States, living in California, and lamenting the on-going depopulation of said BERSs.

My father's people were Southern sharecroppers (well, following the Civil War and other "reversals," they were) ... and you will *never* catch me waxing nostalgic for the passing of that mode of (just barely) living.

My father, after coming North (essentially abandoning the land that he, even as a sharecropper, had managed to purchase at the age of 16), frequently worked two and even three jobs to support his family -- we were poor, and, contrary to the famous saying, we knew it -- and you will *never* catch me waxing nostalgic for the passing of that mode of (just barely) living.

Though, you might catch me lamenting the abandonment of the land, which, at the time, was nearly worthless, for it had never been logged. Still, he chose to feed us in preference to paying the taxes on the land, and for that I am grateful.


edit:
My hometown, South Bend, had those quaint ethnic "white working class neighborhood of the mid twentieth century" when my mother was growing up in the 1930s and 40s. And just as with black and Mexican neighborhoods today, the emphasis was on the 'ethnic' part of "ethnic neighborhood" ... a Pole wasn't safe in a Hungarian neighborhood, nor again either in an Irish neighborhood, and vice versa. The *reason* that South Bend (and no doubt other industrial cities with multiple non-British ethnic groups) had so many small Catholic parishes is that their ethnicity and old-world hatreds were more important to them than their claimed Christianity and common, if somewhat new, Americanness.

I say, thank God that the grandchildren of all those early 20th century ethnic immigrants abandoned "the old neighborhood" and became just regular old Americans.