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"The City Game" by Pete Axthelm
I started reading "The City Game" by Pete Axthelm. The book must have been published in the very early 1970s. The thing that struck me is how little the political climate in the U.S. has changed. The old saying, "Same news, different people" has a lot of truth to it.
"The first week of May had been a brutalizing, feverish ordeal for most New Yorkers. United States troops were slogging into the mud of Cambodia and a shocked young girl was screaming silently from the front pages of newspapers and magazines, in terrible, haunting testimony to the four murders at Kent State University. Anguised demonstrators were assembling near the United Nations and in the Wall Street area, pleading almost hopelessly to a government they knew wasn't listening, fully aware that the cab drivers who cursed them from behind flag decals on dirty taxi windshieds were now the voice of their administration. Then the city's darkest fears took shape, as mobs of Wall Street construction workers unleased the small hatreds and resentments that had been building within them for years, and descended on the young people whom their President had reassured them were merely bums. For two days the workers were content to rain beer cans and insults on the demonstrators. Then, on the afternoon before that final Knicks game, the workers came down to bully the kids at close range. Aided by Wall Street clerks, they went on a sickening spree, ganging up on the kids, kicking them when they were on the pavement, and leaving scores of bloody victims while policmen stood placidly by.
The politics of hate and polarization had thrust deep into New York's guts, and few people on either side could relish the sight of open war between Nixon's newly unleased Silent Majority and the young, the poor, and the black. Countless people groped for sanity in the wounded city, and wondered if it would be sundered irreparably." -- Pete Axthelm
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