[WND] Longtime WND columnist and author Jack Cashill is a lot like me. We can reminisce about the Jersey Shore, those "Wildwood Days" growing up, or comparing Newark and Paterson for hours on end. We're kindred spirits, raised by different mothers and fathers in a not-so-different universe at approximately the same time and place.But I think I only met him once or twice — in Kansas City.
You see, Jack and I were cut out of the same cloth, so to speak.
We were both raised New Jersey boys and never got over the experience — the good, the bad and the ugly.
I've admired Jack much over the years. I wish I had told him that more often. I think I will after just having read his latest exquisite book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities." This a very serious book — in fact the first of its kind — on the subject of "white flight" written from the perspective of those forced to flee.
Yes, I suppose some white people left cities because of racism — probably a distinct minority. Others, like the Cashill family, left with regret because they loved Newark.
"By the end of the 1960s," Cashill recalls, "the state had razed many of our homes, mine included. A lethal riot had scorched the neighborhood. My friends and their families had scattered to the winds, and a twenty-foot-deep trench as wide as a tennis court forever severed the north end of Pigs (short for Pigtails Alley) from the south. To the degree anyone beyond our world noticed, it was to scold us for our own displacement."
Cashill took his title from this exchange:
"I asked one lifelong friend, a loyal Democrat, why he and his widowed mother finally left our block in the early 1970s, twenty years after the first African American families moved in. He searched for a minute for the right set of words and then simply said, 'It became untenable.' When I asked what 'untenable' meant, he answered, 'When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that's untenable.'"
What more is there to say.