MOBS: Consider real roots of hate

I am from the Bronx, and I was there to witness the 1977 Blackout looting and riots. As a result, I loathe and detest mobs, believing them to be a unique form of collective temporary insanity. Members of a mob are possessed by the “demon” of anonymous rage and give up their scruples, their values, their morality, their mind and their very soul. Human beings should never, ever do this to themselves. What mobs do should never, ever be visited upon their friends, neighbors and neighborhoods. I remember the Bronx in the late 1970s as similar to Berlin 1945, because of the scores of burned out buildings and whole city blocks abandoned to the torch. The black and Puerto-Rican residents of some of the worst slums on Earth, including several of my own blood-relatives, literally destroyed their own homes, their own streets, and the few business that had the guts to service those crime-plagued communities and provide their residents with local jobs. The aftermath was such a profound aftershock that the trauma echoed through these blocks to at least our immediate family’s final departure in 1981.

Those who are intentionally stoking mob-violence for political or personal gain are themselves guilty of every crime committed by those ravening mobs. You cannot sell generations of urban youth on a ghetto dead-end sub-culture, and expect them to be capable of leaving that ghetto as adults. Who is responsible for “Ferguson?!” Al Sharpton, and all who call successful African-Americans “Uncle Tom.”

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene