Read Online Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America - Free Book Online Page B
Tags: United States, Historical, Juvenile Nonfiction, History, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century
Ads: Link
cops on yâall. Yâall gotta go home.â
In the early eighties I started noticing neighborhood businesses were closing down. Our favorite candy store and deli, where weâd go as kids to read comic books, closed. The supermarket kept closing and reopening under a new name. The crime level was going up a little bit. People, particularly older people and well-educated people, started moving out of Queens, too. Even when weâd DJ in the park, fewer and fewer people were coming.
So the neighborhood was already starting to go downhill when I left to do a tour from 1984 to 1986. My rap group, Run-DMC, had made it big with our first single. Everywhere we went on tour, and especially in the South, people were talking about this new drug called crack. And weâd see crack fiends on the road and we could see how it hooked people. But we didnât realize crack had penetrated so deep into our own neighborhood.
I came off the tour in 1986 and went home to Hollis. I remember walking around and noticing how desolate everything hadbecome. I looked at the playground, and the bleachers were gone. All the signs were ripped off, and there were holes in the fence and glass and rubbish and garbage all through it. The place looked like a war zone.
I was walking around one afternoon when I heard a woman say, âDarryl!â I turned around and I couldnât figure out who this person was. âItâs me,â she said. She said her name, and I realized she was my good friendâs sister. She may as well have pulled out a gun and shot me, I was so stunned. It was obvious she was using crack, but she was trying to hold a regular conversation as if nothing was wrong. How was I supposed to react when she looked like she weighed about ten pounds? She had lost all her teeth and her clothes were dirty. I had held her as a baby. But now to see her like that, it was really scary.
Everyoneâs sister seemed to be getting addicted to crack. But when I started hearing about peopleâs mothers, I just couldnât believe it. Youâd look at the babies and wonder why they were like that. And it was because the parents were cracked out. I never knew that a drug could have such an impact on a community or a society. Every week something happened, whether it was somebodygetting killed or arrested or dying. It was as if the whole neighborhood started disappearing. It became like a ghost town.
At the time everything in the neighborhood was falling apart, a lot of billboards saying Say No to Drugs were going up. I remember thinking how much money it cost to put up those signs each week. To me, they were spending money on the wrong thing. I knew perfectly well that people werenât gonna look at a sign like that and say, âAll right, Iâm gonna just say no to drugs.â I found out that just telling people not to do drugs doesnât work. Besides, that saying came a little bit too late. Donât you think, Mr. Reagan?
As the gap between the haves and the have-nots got wider, America sometimes felt like a colder, crueler place. Beneath the glitzy surface ran a chilling current of fear. There was fear of crime, certainly, but also fear of failure, of not âmaking itâ in the rush for riches. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had intensified, bringing back fears of nuclear devastation. In 1986 an explosion destroyed the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union. A radioactive cloud spread for miles, contaminating the regionâs soil, crops, and livestock and renewingfears of a nuclear power plant accident in the United States.
But the most paralyzing event of the decade happened in Florida on January 28, 1986. The space shuttle
Challenger
was ready for launch, and it was carrying a very special passenger. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was about to become the first private citizen in space.
In the early eighties I started noticing neighborhood businesses were closing down. Our favorite candy store and deli, where weâd go as kids to read comic books, closed. The supermarket kept closing and reopening under a new name. The crime level was going up a little bit. People, particularly older people and well-educated people, started moving out of Queens, too. Even when weâd DJ in the park, fewer and fewer people were coming.
So the neighborhood was already starting to go downhill when I left to do a tour from 1984 to 1986. My rap group, Run-DMC, had made it big with our first single. Everywhere we went on tour, and especially in the South, people were talking about this new drug called crack. And weâd see crack fiends on the road and we could see how it hooked people. But we didnât realize crack had penetrated so deep into our own neighborhood.
I came off the tour in 1986 and went home to Hollis. I remember walking around and noticing how desolate everything hadbecome. I looked at the playground, and the bleachers were gone. All the signs were ripped off, and there were holes in the fence and glass and rubbish and garbage all through it. The place looked like a war zone.
I was walking around one afternoon when I heard a woman say, âDarryl!â I turned around and I couldnât figure out who this person was. âItâs me,â she said. She said her name, and I realized she was my good friendâs sister. She may as well have pulled out a gun and shot me, I was so stunned. It was obvious she was using crack, but she was trying to hold a regular conversation as if nothing was wrong. How was I supposed to react when she looked like she weighed about ten pounds? She had lost all her teeth and her clothes were dirty. I had held her as a baby. But now to see her like that, it was really scary.
Everyoneâs sister seemed to be getting addicted to crack. But when I started hearing about peopleâs mothers, I just couldnât believe it. Youâd look at the babies and wonder why they were like that. And it was because the parents were cracked out. I never knew that a drug could have such an impact on a community or a society. Every week something happened, whether it was somebodygetting killed or arrested or dying. It was as if the whole neighborhood started disappearing. It became like a ghost town.
At the time everything in the neighborhood was falling apart, a lot of billboards saying Say No to Drugs were going up. I remember thinking how much money it cost to put up those signs each week. To me, they were spending money on the wrong thing. I knew perfectly well that people werenât gonna look at a sign like that and say, âAll right, Iâm gonna just say no to drugs.â I found out that just telling people not to do drugs doesnât work. Besides, that saying came a little bit too late. Donât you think, Mr. Reagan?
As the gap between the haves and the have-nots got wider, America sometimes felt like a colder, crueler place. Beneath the glitzy surface ran a chilling current of fear. There was fear of crime, certainly, but also fear of failure, of not âmaking itâ in the rush for riches. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had intensified, bringing back fears of nuclear devastation. In 1986 an explosion destroyed the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union. A radioactive cloud spread for miles, contaminating the regionâs soil, crops, and livestock and renewingfears of a nuclear power plant accident in the United States.
But the most paralyzing event of the decade happened in Florida on January 28, 1986. The space shuttle
Challenger
was ready for launch, and it was carrying a very special passenger. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was about to become the first private citizen in space.
Similar Books
