Date: 6/19/2005 3:14:00 PM
From Authorid: 63077
Oh, man, Mom and I lived in Milwaukee when until I was 18 months or so. Obviously, I don't remember any of those stories, but as she's related them to me, here are some of them. First, there was the time we were crossing in front of a church to get from the store to our car, and she heard a voice on a megaphone insisting that she drop on the ground and cover her child. Turns out there was somebody holed up in the church shooting at the police on the road. That's partially her fault for somehow not noticing the police, but wow. Then there was the time she had started warming up a bottle in the kitchen, changed my daiper in the living room, and returned to find all the kitchen appliances save for the refrigerator and stove gone, or when after a week of our garage getting ripped off nightly and the police (I don't blame them, back then Milwaukee was a relatively rough town) taking upwards of 30 minutes to reach us, she just filled a box with dirty daipers. They never returned. When we moved to Pennsylvania (back to PA, for my mother, who grew up there), we lived in Allentown, which was also a pretty nasty city. My best friend lived in a Dutch style house, where the houses were relatively deep but really thin, and the backs of two rows would face each other, forming a boxed in alley in between all the backyards. We were playing outside once when a shootout between two neighbors started across the alley, and I can't even remember all the times we heard gunshots or a mugging outside his window at night. A kid at my daycare came in with an M-80 once and blew up a toilet. By around third grade, we moved into Salisbury, a township of Allentown, and nine days after moving in our house was broken into and quite a bit robbed while mom was at work and I was at daycare. Some real craziness, I tell ya. USMC0705  |
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Date: 6/19/2005 3:14:00 PM
From Authorid: 63077
Whoa, that was a lot more than I had anticipated. My bad. :-D USMC0705 |
Date: 6/19/2005 4:14:00 PM
From Authorid: 18928
that is sad. do you live in a big city?  |
Date: 6/19/2005 4:55:00 PM ( From Author )
From Authorid: 62476
salisbury is evil lol..and yup I live in a huge city  |
Date: 6/19/2005 6:01:00 PM
From Authorid: 7574
That's crazy..We don't have much excitement here (that I know about) except for people stealing from Wal-Mart, random dogs eating old ladies and little kids, a couple murders and of course the snipers a few years back. Now that was actually pretty scary; a lot of that stuff was really close to my house and I was at the Wendy's next door to the Ponderosa just an hour or so before a guy was shot in the parking lot. I drive past two of the shooting locations quite often, and wow, it does make you think.  |
Date: 6/19/2005 8:14:00 PM
From Authorid: 35720
Allentown represent. <3  |
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Date: 6/19/2005 8:19:00 PM
From Authorid: 63077
I didn't know until just a few moments ago that you're from Allentown. Slick. :-D USMC0705 |
Date: 6/19/2005 9:59:00 PM
From Authorid: 5886
My neighborhood is generally considered safe and quiet, although during my 19 years of living, it's been brutal outside. There were small things like cars being keyed, burglaries, and a carjacking a block from my house... an armed suspect apparently trampled a bunch of shrubs in my back yard while on the run (nobody was home at the time), but us and the police were searching with flashlights in the rain for his gun that he actually dropped a few blocks away. About 10 years ago, a house across the street had a huge party... more than 100 people, kegs of alcohol, and it ended up erupting into a riot. The party people were urinating and vomitting in many people's yards and on their houses, and when the cops arrived things got violent. My dad told me if I ever heard a loud bang, just drop to the floor and cover my head. Glad those days are gone.  |
Date: 6/20/2005 12:02:00 AM
From Authorid: 37872
This is interesting. I hope your awareness intrigues you and excites you to do what you can in your life to make things better. I hope that you don't believe that your city and this world is a bad place to live just because there are incidents like this and I hope that you realize that your proper understanding of these kinds of things can only help the world and your city to become a better place. One interesting fact that can bring you assurance that there is hope out there is that in the last decade, violent crime rates in our country have actually gone down every year....  |
