Dr. Richard Moss - Blacks
Blacks
I grew up with blacks. They were among my closest friends. We hung out together at PS 86 shooting hoop and at my house on Friday and Saturday nights. They called me “Brother Richard” and we were as loyal to each other as could be. Some came from Harlem, taking the train up to the Bronx, part of the effort then to "integrate" public schools. Most came from the Marble Hill Projects in upper Manhattan just across the river. I have lost touch with all of them but remember them well. In the Facebook era, I have been able to reconnect with several of them.
My friendship with blacks from that era and fiery support of typical black/left wing causes at the time has not tempered my realization that racism is emphatically not at the heart of the range of problems affecting the black community today (poverty, crime, violence, educational failure…) but rather a variety of self inflicted, destructive behavioral patterns centered around a crushing rate of illegitimate births, noxious role models, negative attitudes towards education, a “victim” mentality, and entrenched habits of dependency, these the bitter harvest of forty years of misguided liberal social policies.
My background as a former street kid from the Bronx (with numerous black friends) whose single parent family was engulfed by drugs and other urban afflictions, allows me, I feel, to speak credibly and honestly about racial matters.
Drugs and the Counterculture
Drugs were rampant in the Bronx in the giddy, crazed, hippy days of the sixties and seventies. There were no friends I knew of that escaped its enticements, except perhaps the “greasers” who opted for beer. As if a harbinger of sordid things to come, I can recall a science teacher in eighth grade at JHS 143 sermonizing about the dangers of marijuana while, unbeknownst to him, the class junkie was snorting heroin in the back of the room.
It hit my generation hard but really smacked an older brother’s age group right between the eyes. It seemed as if every kid in our heavily Jewish neighborhood was getting stoned. I remember the bewilderment of responsible, loving parents who had sacrificed to raise their children properly only to watch them go up in smoke, so to speak, consumed by the now dominant and destructive norms of the counterculture. Good little Jewish boys and girls from stable Jewish homes now dressed like slobs with beads and sandals and other totems of the age, listening to wild music, speaking a bizarre new idiom, and using all manner of mind altering substances including quite commonly heroin.
There were many casualties, including at least four kids from the neighborhood, two of whom were close friends, that went to sleep and never woke up. All part of the legacy of the sixties, the decade that Lefties hearken back to nostalgically as their greatest years.