Original-From: mhwpa!ktw (Kenneth T Wolman +1 201 564 2866)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Wed, 4 Nov 1992 16:08:00 EST
From:         ktw@MHWPA.ATT.COM
Subject:      The View From New Jersey

>One of my dinner companions Saturday night remarked, "If you think Newark
>is bad, you should see Elizabeth, NJ." I had; he was right. But for the
>sake of narrative, I stuck with Newark as the symbol of urban blight. And
>I never even bothered describing the view we had off the Elevated into the
>projects and ghettoes that line the water on the west side of Manhattan.
>Frankly, I was shocked and ashamed that we've allowed our cities to sink
>so deep. Not until that day had I ever thought of Edinburg, Texas as an
>"idyll."

Newark is unquestionably awful.  But it's infamous largely because the
airport and the Main Line make it visible and accessible, and even
people who don't remember The Riots in 1967 have heard about them.
Drive into the city on Route 280 and you can see the shells of housing
projects that were trashed by their inhabitants: if one of the
definitions of Jungle is a place where the inhabitants prey on their
own species, Newark fits the definition as well as any large American
city.

Elizabeth requires a bit of a trek beyond the airport and may be for
people with a social conscience and a sense of human misery, but it
takes a true connoisseur of dying civilizations to appreciate
Paterson, about 10 miles to Newark's north.  Newark, as bad as it can
be, has a core of business that keeps it afloat.  It has a cultural
life, a national-class art museum and public library, Rutgers Law
School, a medical school, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
It has the Portuguese neighborhood along Ferry Street.  It has a
lively culture of writers and musicians, and a great FM jazz radio
station.

But Paterson?  Its infant mortality figures equal Newark's, and the
schools are guaranteed to finish off any survivors: schools that are
so bad they are being managed by the State of New Jersey because the
Paterson city government has proved too corrupt and/or incapable of
dealing with its population to run those schools with anything
approaching competence.  Even in times of prosperity, lines of men
stand on the sidewalks with nothing to do.  People get shot for
bicycles, Nike sneakers, and dirty looks.  This happens in Newark,
too, but that is ALL there is to Paterson.  There IS no business to
speak of, nothing to make the downtown area any better in the daytime
than it is at night.  Old-timers can recite a litany of stores that
have moved to the suburbs or closed their doors.  The city has a
population of about 145,000 people and one supermarket.  The
residents, again defining The Jungle, burned or looted the others out
of existence.

When you have no hope and don't have the character of Superman, and
when you know that your society is going to confine you to the role of
Shithouse Cleaner and Professional Nigger, you tend to give up and
take revenge on the society around you.  Many Jews did so in
extermination camps, many blacks do so in Paterson.  The gates are
invisible but the roads out are illusory.

My wife works as a social worker for a hospital-operated health care
program that handles the needs of pregnant women.  She has been there
two years and has repeater clients: women who seem to get pregnant via
immaculate conception because they SWEAR their "husbands" (i.e., the
current guys in their lives) are in Quito or San Juan or Santo Domingo
or Lima.  She has 14 year old girls come in for prenatal counseling.
She has women come in who test positive for AIDS and will die and take
their babies with them.  It would be more merciful to take these
babies up on the roof and throw them off, but you can't do that.
That's almost as bad as discussing abortion or suggesting that the
current scumbag someone is sleeping with USE one to prevent another
vile little tragedy.

Edinburg, Texas may just be an idyll after that.

Ken
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