Free Report from Engine Co. 82 by Dennis Smith Page B

kind of town, and as long as the law is obeyed, the high school students are orderly, and the taxes
     are kept low, the townspeople remain passive. But if, as happened recently, a student bewildered by the shootings at Kent
     State paints a picture of the American flag rimmed with question marks, and the school’s art teacher hangs the painting in
     the main corridor, the local chapter of the John Birch Society can be counted on to protect American ideals by demanding that
     the teacher be fired. It was the most exciting series of events since I’ve lived here. The Birchers made headlines in the
     local paper for three days, but finally they succeeded only in making a lot of noise. The painting remained hanging and the
     teacher kept his job—facts that instill confidence in my Irish-Catholic-Democratic heart.
    The town was a stopping place of the underground railroad, which provided freedom for so many Negroes prior to the Civil War.
     As a result, there is a large black population in Washingtonville. But even the blacks are insulated from the problems faced
     by residents of bigger towns. There is no real poverty or deprivation here. Very few people are on the county welfare rolls.
     There is no black section of town, but there are black and white sections. A black family lives down the street from us. A
     young black couple just moved in two houses away. Nobody got excited, and that’s what I like about Washington-ville. It’s
     unfortunate, though, that I had to travel sixty miles away from New York City to find it.
    Like most firemen who have moved from the city, my children are my first consideration. I want them to be able to go to school
     without being held up by a fifth-grader for their lunch money. They can ride their bicycles through the neighborhood with
     a feeling of freedom. They can park their bikes and go rambling through the woods, knowing that the bikes will be there on
     their return. They can leam to defend themselves, and to stick up for what they think is right by arguing with the kids next
     door. They won’t have to fight their way-through a band of marauding youths. There aren’t any. They have a good chance of
     reaching adolescence unscarred.
    Of course, things change, and people change from day to day. The day may come to gather family and possessions and move on.
     It’s my job as head of the family to watch for changes that will alter our relation to our society. Right now we feel secure.
     Tomorrow, perhaps, we may have to move on. It’s not like running away, but rather like keeping one step ahead of insanity.
    New York City is simply too big. I have lived in it too long to hate it, but I know it too well to love it. I am still a part
     of it, yet I feel removed, like a broken jockey who grooms horses. 1 earn my living caring for it, but I feel helpless because
     I know that I can’t train it, or ride it, or make it win. New York’s leaders are aristocrats who have never labored, or political
     hacks who have conned and schemed their way up. I have never been convinced that aristocrats really care about the problems
     of the poor or the ignorant, about the vermin-infested, broken-walled coops that people are forced to huddle in and call home.
     Rather, they have developed through their private educational system and their Parke-Bernet preview-showing kind of society
     a patronizing benevolence that sounds good in campaign speeches, and looks good in print. But they never knew there was a
     drug problem in this country until their own children began to get arrested. They find easy moral arguments against the war
     in Asia because it isn’t their own who are coming home in rectangular boxes, and they don’t have to rationalize the significance
     of death.
    I have more respect for the old-style machine politicians. They, at least, had the perception to recognize an ugly system,
     and to learn how to operate within it. They paid their dues in city government. They didn’t buy it.