ALAN writes:

I came across a news article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently about a school in St. Louis County. It was headlined, “Normandy High: The most dangerous school in the area.”

The article describes intimidation, fights, guns, pepper spray, and students with names like “Daija’h,” “Ta’Darrian,” “Damontae,” “Marquez,” and “Tamia.” The article states:

In 2012, the school reported 285 discipline incidents — such as assaults, drugs and weapons — that resulted in out-of-school suspension, a rate of more than one for every four students, the highest among high schools in the region.

A Kansas City school, the Central Academy of Academic Excellence, was the only school in the state to report a higher level of sheer bedlam and lawlessness. The article describes the standard excuse-making and excuse-validating by those who run Normandy High. It is the latter that make the former possible.

Why did all this command my attention? Because a good friend graduated from that same high school many years ago. Yet she never told me of having to dodge bullets or pepper spray during her school years. That her high school has now acquired a distinction as the “most dangerous;” that people with alien names and habits now occupy that school; that those who run it are accomplished practitioners of excuse-making and excuse-validating; and that our peaceful neighborhood in St. Louis was erased and permitted to become the site of boarded-up houses and random lawlessness – surely these things must be literary inventions of some science fiction-fantasy writer.

All of us lived on the same street in a peaceful residential neighborhood of south St. Louis. My friend, who graduated from Normandy High in 1959, and her husband had two infant children when we met them in 1963. We shared many happy hours, going on Sunday drives, playing card games, bowling, babysitting, hanging laundry in the basement, and taking leisurely evening walks to the ice cream fountain of a nearby dairy.

Also within walking distance from where we lived in those years were: A Catholic hospital, two parochial schools, two public schools, a Sears department store, a Kroger supermarket, two dime stores, three drug stores, three groceries, three bakeries, a hobby shop, a jewelry store, a hardware store, a flower shop, an office supplies store, and two diners.  Today, all those places are gone – long since closed, demolished, or converted to other uses.  A huge factory-warehouse building half a mile away now stands closed and silent.  A tall warehouse building farther down that street is now boarded-up.

That neighborhood was as pleasant as could be in 1963.  But in recent decades it was made over into a center of “diversity,” which is why it also became a center of crime and lawlessness.  All of us moved away from there long before then.

Fifty years ago, I may not have believed that Americans could be so soft, so acquiescent, so spineless, or so degenerate morally, intellectually, or culturally as to permit those things to be done to their schools and neighborhoods. But they sure proved me wrong.

My friend died last year. No one ever had a better person for a friend.  What a grotesque insult that school and that neighborhood have become to the decent, principled people like her who made them as good as they once were.

— Comments —

James N. writes:

What a sad story! There are so many of them, in Hartford, in Rochester, in Baltimore and Philadelphia. In Birmingham. In Memphis. Detroit, of course. The displaced people all experience it as a local story – what happened to “my” neighborhood. Those of us who are far away from it prefer not to think about it at all.

But it’s a national phenomenon, the emergence of a state within a state – a Savage Archipelago, the islands connected by affinity, by the mystic chords of memory, by hip-hop music and popular culture, and now by Facebook and Twitter.

Citizens of the Savage Archipelago have more in common with each other than they do with the citizens of the United States who surround them. Although their ingathering to their islands has been voluntary, 45 years of hateful propaganda has convinced them that it has been done to them.

Violence by the inhabitants of all the “bad areas” has surged. A new nation is emerging. It’s a much bigger story than what has happened to your old neighborhood, or mine.

Holder was right about one thing – we are much too cowardly to discuss this.

Laura writes:

The “Savage Archipelago.” Perfect. That’s a term that should replace “the inner city.”

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