Category Archives: Life

Kitty Genovese Was Raped and Killed 50 Years Ago, But…

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Everybody who was around in 1964 knows the story of Kitty Genovese. She’s the young woman who was stabbed to death on a street in New York City while 38 witnesses supposedly did nothing to help.

The lesson we all learned back then was that society was falling apart. People would listen to somebody screaming outside their window and do nothing because “they didn’t want to get involved”, especially a bunch of self-centered, cowardly, unfeeling big-city types. I was only 12 at the time, living on the other side of the continent, but it was easy for me and everyone else to form a mental image of what happened that night: a woman repeatedly crying for help in a narrow street or alley as onlookers looked down from their windows or sat on their fire escapes doing nothing.

An article in the New York Post (by the way, one of the most unreliable newspapers in America) tells a very different story, based on a new book called Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America.

It was 3 a.m. Somebody called the police immediately after Genovese was stabbed on the street (although the police didn’t show up, not realizing the nature of the incident). She was able to walk home but collapsed in her apartment building’s vestibule, not outside where people could hear her. Her killer was initially scared away by a witness, but then followed her into the building and attacked her again. That’s where she died as one of her neighbors held her in her arms.

According to the article, there were two witnesses who were certainly blameworthy. One of them even said “he didn’t want to get involved”. But if you believe the Post article, this is another case in which a story got told and retold because it confirmed something people already believed: people who live in big cities aren’t real Americans and don’t care enough about anyone else to bother calling the cops when a young woman is being raped and murdered. Which, if you’ve ever spent much time in New York City, where you tend to rub shoulders with lots of different people every day, you know isn’t true at all.

On a related note, does living in a city like New York make you more or less accepting of people who don’t look or sound like you? You see people whose families came from everywhere in the world going about their daily business, sitting next to you on the subway, or waiting in line at the deli. Familiarity breeds contempt sometimes, or a bad experience does the same, but I think that sharing space with a wide variety of people all behaving in similar ways tends to make city-dwellers more favorable toward democracy and social programs. Maybe it’s easier to be a liberal, less fearful or disdainful of those “other” people, if you see all manner of human beings up close, following the rules, doing the same things you do every day. 

Breaking the Chain

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Once upon a time, before blogs ruled the earth, somebody invented the Liebster Award. It was probably a German, because “liebster” is German for “beloved” or “favorite”.

The idea is that you nominate a blog for the award if you think it deserves more readers. In this latest round of nominations, the cutoff for getting the award is having fewer than 200 followers. This humble blog currently has 181 followers, so it qualifies with respect to the numbers. Whether WOCS deserves to have more readers is a more difficult question (it’s possible it should have fewer).

Anyway, a fellow blogger nominated WOCS for the Liebster today, after being nominated himself. So, to accept the award, I’m supposed to answer 10 questions sent to me by the other blogger, and also nominate other supposedly underappreciated blogs.

However, although I’m pleased to have been nominated – as anyone would be – I’ve decided not to “accept” the award by fulfilling the requirements above. Instead, I’m merely going to mention some blogs I follow and which you might enjoy too (one of which has many more than 200 followers).

Fortunately, the nomination doesn’t come with a threat, unlike a standard chain letter. If I’d been told that failure to continue this process would result in some catastrophe or other (locusts? none of my favorite cereal at A&P?), I definitely would have complied. You can’t be too careful about these things (well, actually, you can).

Now for those blogs I recommend:

First, there is SelfAwarePatterns. The author of this very interesting blog writes about science and philosophy, among other things, and gets a lot of intelligent comments. Also, I agree with him more often than not (he’s obviously a very bright guy).

Another philosophical blog I recommend is ausomeawestin. The author argues vigorously for moral realism, the idea that judgments like “Susan is a good person” or “Sam did the right thing” are true or false just as much as statements like “Copper conducts electricity”. In other words, we can have knowledge about ethics. I tend to disagree, but I’m not sure why, and I’ve greatly enjoyed discussing the issue with ausomeawestin’s proprietor.

Lastly, on a very different note, there is Beguiling Hollywood, operated by Vickie Lester (presumably a pseudonym, since “Vicki Lester” is the character played by Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland in their respective versions of A Star Is Born). Ms. Lester mostly writes about old Hollywood and also has a wonderful supply of related photographs, which she shares on a daily basis, like this one of Frederic March and Janet Gaynor from that famous old movie:

fredric-march-janet-gaynor-a-star-is-born

Ok, my part of the chain is now broken, but do consider taking a look at these deserving blogs. They’re fun and educational too!

Memories Are Made of Something

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A lot of us old people are excited about the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. It was February 9, 1964. A Sunday night, of course. I was 12 years old and we were living in an isolated area six miles west of Lancaster, California, in the desert about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. I remember watching the program, as we did every Sunday night, right before Bonanza. Everybody watched Ed Sullivan and Bonanza.

I also remember being excited about the Beatles’ performance that night and how excited my friend Dwight was too. Dwight was a tall, skinny kid, three or four years older than me, which was a little odd, but there weren’t many kids my age where we lived. That night is one of my favorite memories from those years.

Today, however, it occurred to me that by 1964, I was in junior high (the 7th grade) and we had moved into Lancaster, where I attended Piute School (it’s still there). We weren’t living in the desert outside of town anymore and I couldn’t have talked about the show with Dwight. I’m pretty sure he and I never saw each other again after my family moved into town. 

Maybe Dwight and I watched something else one night and were excited about that? And as the years went by I somehow combined that memory with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan? Is it ok that some of the best things we remember never happened? 

At least I don’t remember being at the show in New York City with all those screaming girls, but give me a few years. 

Something They Don’t Tell You About Retirement

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They didn’t tell me anyway.

After years of meeting or trying to meet deadlines, you suddenly have very few reasons to do anything at any particular time. No more “status reports are due by 3 pm” or “performance reviews must be submitted by November 15”. No more “close of business on Friday”.

Not that anybody ever dies by failing to meet a deadline, but when you’re retired, almost everything can wait. The most onerous deadline I have these days is getting a book back to the library on time (and they make it so easy to renew – they probably feel as silly asking for ten or twenty cents as you do paying it).

Of course, on the assumption that having a deadline can lead to beneficial activity, you can give yourself deadlines. That sounds funny at first, like the all-powerful Queen who makes a law she supposedly has to obey. But some serious people, Immanuel Kant, for example, have argued that freedom and autonomy don’t “consist in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one’s own making” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 

You figure out what’s right and then you do it for that reason. You use one of those great calendar applications to set your deadline, pick a nice color and set up an appropriate reminder. I haven’t done this much yet, but it sounds like a really good way to add some urgency to retired life.

Plus, when it looks like you won’t meet your deadline, you can simply drag it to some future, more agreeable date. That’s freedom and autonomy in spades!

Which reminds me of what the comedian Rita Rudner once said, something like:

“It’s great being single. There’s so much freedom. If you want, you can buy a chocolate cake, eat a big slice of it for dinner and then throw the rest in the trash. Then, the next morning, you can take something out of the trash and have it for breakfast.”

Ulysses S. Grant on Fear

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Ulysses S. Grant, having been appointed to his first military command shortly after the Civil War began, was nervous. He was leading his troops toward what he believed to be the encampment of “Tom Harris and his 1200 secessionists”:

As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.

Then, at last being able to look into the valley, he saw signs that there had been a large camp below, but the secessionists had departed:

My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.

I really like this guy. I’m glad he was on our side.